This paper presents a particle-filtering method for estimating formant frequencies of speech signals from spectrograms. First, frequency bands corresponding to the analyzed formants are extracted via a two-step dynamic programming based algorithm. A particle-filtering method is then used to accurately locate formants in every formant areas based on the posterior pdf described by a set of suppor...

This study attempts to acoustically characterize the most common filled pause vocalizations (or vocalic fillers) in spontaneous speech in European Portuguese: the near-open central vowel [å] and the mid-central vowel [ə]. For this purpose we analyzed the spectral information of the vocalic fillers by estimating their first two formant frequencies as well as their duration properties. The vocali...

Temporal-order perception of phoneme segments in running speech is much superior to temporal-order perception in repeating vowel sequences. The more rapid rates possible in running speech may be due largely to the presence of formant transitions. In a series of five experiments we observed that many temporal-order misjudgements of repeating vowels can be explained in terms of auditory stream se...

This paper presents an evaluation of the use of some auditory-based acoustic distinctive features and formant cues for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Comparative experiments have indicated that the use of either the formant magnitudes or the formant frequencies combined with some auditory-based acoustic distinctive features and the classical MFCCs within a multi-stream statistical framewor...

Formant bandwidth is known to have little effect on vowel quality. This paper shows that it has a strong effect on mutual masking between vowels. Subjects presented with stimuli consisting of pairs of synthetic vowels were requested to report one or two vowels for each stimulus. Identification rates were calculated independently for both vowels in the stimulus. Vowels had either the same or dif...

High-pitched productions present difficulties in formant frequency analysis due to wide harmonic spacing and poorly defined formants. As a consequence, there is little reliable data regarding children's spoken or sung vowel formants. Twenty-nine 11-year-old Swedish children were asked to produce 4 sustained spoken and sung vowels. In order to circumvent the problem of wide harmonic spacing, F1 ...

In this study, we investigated the effects of changes in formant structure of externally presented speech signals on participants’ auditory perception of their own speech output (i.e., feedback) during a word production task. The study involved a novel combination of two previously established research paradigms: (1) sensorimotor adaptation to altered auditory feedback during speech, and (2) ex...

The audio signal from five professional baritones was analyzed by means of spectrum analysis. Each subject sang syllables [pae] and [pa] from loudest to softest phonation at fundamental frequencies representing 25%, 50%, and 75% of his total range. Ten subglottal pressures, equidistantly spaced between highest and lowest, were selected for analysis along with the corresponding production of the...

In this paper we present a complex linear prediction analysis method for estimating the formant frequencies of noisy speech. The proposed method effectively utilizes the signal (being the analytic signal) which is ignored in the conventional complex linear prediction analysis to achieve noise reduction. Also, the covariance and forward-backward linear prediction (FBLP) methods are compared, and...

LPC analysis is one of the most powerful techniques in speech analysis. Spectral zeros during consonant or consonant-vowel transition regions introduce difficulties in estimating LPC parameters. In this paper, we propose to estimate formant frequencies from LPC model by MUSIC (Multiple Signal Classification) and ESPRIT (Estimation of Signal Parameters via Rotational Invariance Techniques). Form...