The effect of formant trajectories and phoneme durations on vowel intelligibility

Amano-Kusumoto, Akiko; Hosom, John-Paul

doi:10.1109/icassp.2009.4960674

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Each word was repeated 16 times spoken in CNV, CNV/SLOW, CLR/FAST and CLR styles; intelligibility was previously examined in [2]. The total of 320 (5 words × 4 styles × 16 repetitions) samples were analyzed.…”

Section: Results Of Formant Contour Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The intelligibility of CLR speech is known to be higher than that of conversational (CNV) speech, which is spoken as if talking with a colleague [1]. Previously, vowel intelligibility of CNV speech was significantly improved by modifying formant contours to resemble those of CLR speech [2]. The condition where formant steady-state values of CNV speech were matched to those of CLR speech was effective, without modifying phoneme durations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

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Effect of speaking style and speaking rate on formant contours

Amano-Kusumoto¹,

Hosom²

2010

2010 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

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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.

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Section: Results Of Formant Contour Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Effect of speaking style and speaking rate on formant contours

Amano-Kusumoto¹,

Hosom²

2010

2010 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

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Determining the relevance of different aspects of formant contours to intelligibility

Amano-Kusumoto

Hosom

Kain

et al. 2014

Speech Communication

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Previous studies have shown that “clear” speech, where the speaker intentionally tries to enunciate, has better intelligibility than “conversational” speech, which is produced in regular conversation. However, conversational and clear speech vary along a number of acoustic dimensions and it is unclear what aspects of clear speech lead to better intelligibility. Previously, Kain et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 124 (4), 2308–2319 (2008)] showed that a combination of short-term spectra and duration was responsible for the improved intelligibility of one speaker. This study investigates subsets of specific features of short-term spectra including temporal aspects. Similar to Kain’s study, hybrid stimuli were synthesized with a combination of features from clear speech and complementary features from conversational speech to determine which acoustic features cause the improved intelligibility of clear speech. Our results indicate that, although steady-state formant values of tense vowels contributed to the intelligibility of clear speech, neither the steady-state portion nor the formant transition was sufficient to yield comparable intelligibility to that of clear speech. In contrast, when the entire formant contour of conversational speech including the phoneme duration was replaced by that of clear speech, intelligibility was comparable to that of clear speech. It indicated that the combination of formant contour and duration information was relevant to the improved intelligibility of clear speech. The study provides a better understanding of the relevance of different aspects of formant contours to the improved intelligibility of clear speech.

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Kalman tracking linear predictor for vowel intelligibility enhancement on european portuguese HMM based speech synthesis

Coelho

Braga

Garcı́a-Mateo

2010

2010 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

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The recent developments on Hidden Markov Models (HMM) based speech synthesis showed that this is a promising technology fully capable of competing with other established techniques. However some issues still lack a solution. Several authors report an over-smoothing phenomenon on both time and frequencies which decreases naturalness and sometimes intelligibility. In this work we present a new vowel intelligibility enhancement algorithm that uses a discrete Kalman filter (DKF) for tracking frame based parameters. The inter-frame correlations are modelled by an autoregressive structure which provides an underlying time frame dependency and can improve time-frequency resolution. The system's performance has been evaluated using objective and subjective tests and the proposed methodology has led to improved results.

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The effect of formant trajectories and phoneme durations on vowel intelligibility

Cited by 4 publications

References 8 publications

Effect of speaking style and speaking rate on formant contours

Effect of speaking style and speaking rate on formant contours

Determining the relevance of different aspects of formant contours to intelligibility

Kalman tracking linear predictor for vowel intelligibility enhancement on european portuguese HMM based speech synthesis

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