________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Acoustic characterization of phonologically voiced obstruents in Shanghai dialect In Shanghainese, phonologically voiced obstruents in word-initial, accented position are phonetically voiceless and are distinguished from the others (i.e., voiceless and/or aspirated) mainly by a low tone regi...

In this paper we propose the MVDR method, which is based upon the Minimum Variance Distortionless Response (MVDR) spectrum estimation method, for modeling voiced speech. Developed to overcome some of the shortcomings of Linear Prediction models, the MVDR method provides better models for medium and high pitch voiced speech. The MVDR model is an all-pole model whose spectrum is easily obtained f...

Plosives in Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi and Marathi display a 4-way contrast involving the two dimensions of voicing and aspiration. While many studies are available on the acoustics of aspiration in unvoiced stops due to their more universal presence in the world’s languages, voiced aspirated plosives have been less studied. Rather than the release duration cue of aspiration in unvoiced...

In this paper, a novel method for voiced / unvoiced decision in speech and music signals is presented. Voiced unvoiced decision is required for many applications, including better modeling for analysis/synthesis, detection of model changes for segmentation purposes and better signal characterization for indexing and recognition applications. The proposed method is based on the Generalized Likel...

The perception of voiced fricatives by native speakers of a language which lacks those phonemes is studied in this paper. Brasilian portuguese and Galician languages were chosen because they are historically related. A forced choice test reveals that listeners correctly perceive the place of articulation of the voiced fricatives. In order to examine whether the perception of fricative manner ca...

This study investigates phonetic variation of voicing correlates in French obstruents. A controlled set of words was extracted from a large broadcast news corpus providing 378 word-initial singleton obstruents /t, d, k, s/. An expert investigation, by eye and ear, of the productions revealed that phonologically voiced obstruents are phonetically voiced most of the time (96%), while a large numb...

Over the past decades a number of research findings have illustrated the extraordinary robustness and flexibility of human speech perception, which combines sensitivity to surprisingly detailed aspects of systematic context-governed variability in word forms with an ability to extract information about the speaker's intended words from minimal information in a sometimes highly reduced signal. S...

For applications such as tone modeling and automatic tone recognition, smoothed F0 (pitch) all-voiced pitch tracks are desirable. Three pitch trackers that have been shown to give good accuracy for pitch tracking are YAAPT, YIN, and PRAAT. On tests with English and Japanese databases, for which ground truth pitch tracks are available by other means, we show that YAAPT has lower errors than YIN ...

Canadian Raising is the best-known of a diverse class of English allophonic height alternations in /ai/ conditioned by coda voicing. The alternations have been independently re-innovated and show a systematic typology: The voiceless environment selects the higher allophone. We hypothesize that the phonetic basis of the asymmetry is the tendency for diphthongs to assimilate to their nuclei befor...

In Western music, the major mode is typically used to convey excited, happy, bright or martial emotions, whereas the minor mode typically conveys subdued, sad or dark emotions. Recent studies indicate that the differences between these modes parallel differences between the prosodic and spectral characteristics of voiced speech sounds uttered in corresponding emotional states. Here we ask wheth...