Effect of speaking style and speaking rate on formant contours

Abstract

This paper presents the results of formant analysis using a newly developed formant contour model. We model formant contours with a linear combination of formant target values and coarticulation functions for /wVl/ and /tVl/ words. While formant target values are estimated globally over different speaking styles, coarticulation coefficients are estimated for individual tokens. The results show that the estimated coarticulation coefficients are inherently different between clear (CLR) and conversational (CNV) speech and that the movement of articulators when producing CLR speech is faster than when producing CNV speech. On the other hand, speaking rate is not a key determinant in movement of articulators at vowel onsets. The direct measure of F2 slope is strongly correlated with estimated coarticulation coefficients, which may lead to less parameters to estimate.