Purpose The aim of this study was to investigate how different types background noise that differ in their level linguistic content affect speech acoustics, fluency, and language production for young adult speakers when performing a monologue discourse task. Method Forty adults monologued by responding open-ended questions silent baseline five conditions (debate, movie dialogue, contemporary mu...

It is often assumed that acoustic-phonetic or articulatory features can be beneficial for automatic speech recognition (ASR), e.g. because of their supposedly greater noise robustness or because they provide a more convenient interface to higher-level components of ASR systems such as pronunciation modeling. However, the success of these features when used as an alternative to standard acoustic...

Objective: The purpose of this paper is to examine how different aspects of sound—noise, speech privacy, speech intelligibility, and music—impact patient and staff outcomes in healthcare settings and the specific environmental design strategies that can be used to improve the acoustical environment of healthcare settings. Methods: This paper provides a literature review of peer-reviewed journal...

The dominant cue to distinguish lexical tones is the fundamental frequency. In whisper, no such information is available due to the lack of excitation of the vocal folds. This paper examines the acoustics of Mandarin tonal contrasts in whispered speech and compares it with that of normal speech, aiming to identify potential cues for tone identification in situations where the major pitch correl...

Recent neural models are capable of generating quantitative patterns of speech articulation and speech acoustics. Five models are discussed here: the DIVA model, the task dynamics model, the ACT model, the Warlaumont model and the Hickok model. These models have a more or less strong background in neuroscience. Directions are identified in this paper for a further development of quantitative pr...

In this paper, a text-independent Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN)-based Speaker Verification system is presented. Modular structure with a distinct PNN for each enrolled speaker is used. A gender-dependent universal background model is built to represent the impostor speakers. A detailed description of the system, as well as the time required for training and processing all the test trials i...

Fundamental to the success of the articulatory based speech coding is the mapping from acoustics to articulatory description. As the mapping is not unique and based on articulatory continuity criteria, the non-uniqueness of the articulatory trajectories is solved using a forward dynamic network. In this paper, we present new results on forward dynamic network used to estimate articulatory traje...

The paper investigates the potential of HMM based synthesis to support the parameterisation of expressive speech in German. First, we review the assets of HMMs in the perspective of previous works in speech modelling and speech transformation. It is shown that HMMs define a flexible parametric model of the speech acoustics, which readily integrates several levels of speech modelling, such as di...

Past studies have shown that speakers spontaneously adjust their speech acoustics in response to their auditory feedback perturbed in real time. In the case of formant perturbation, the majority of studies have examined speaker's compensatory production using the English vowel /ɛ/ as in the word "head." Consistent behavioral observations have been reported, and there is lively discussion as to ...

This paper examines the degree of correlation between lip and jaw con guration and speech acoustics. The lip and jaw positions are characterised by a system of measurements taken from video images of the speaker's face and pro le, and the acoustics are represented using line spectral pair parameters and a measure of RMS energy. A correlation is found between the measured acoustic parameters and...