Acoustic signal typing for evaluation of voice quality in tracheoesophageal speech

Summary: Because of the aperiodicity of many tracheoesophageal voices, acoustic analysis of the tracheoesophageal voice is less straightforward than that of the normal voice. This study presents the development and testing of an acoustic signal typing system based on visual inspection of a narrow-band spectrogram that can be used by researchers for classification of voice quality in tracheoesophageal speech. In addition to this classification system, a selection of acoustic measures [median fundamental frequency, standard deviation of fundamental frequency, jitter, percentage of voiced (%Voiced), harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR), glottal-to-noise excitation (GNE) ratio, and band energy difference (BED)] was computed to provide more insight into the acoustic components of tracheoesophageal voice quality. For clinical relevance, relationships between the acoustic signal types and an overall judgment of the voice were investigated as well. Results showed that the four acoustic signal types form a good basis for performing more acoustic analyses and give a good impression of the overall quality of the voice

Automatic recognition of schwa variants in spontaneous Hungarian speech

This paper analyzes the nature of the process involved in optional vowel reduction in Hungarian, and the acoustic structure of schwa variants in spontaneous speech. The study focuses on the acoustic patterns of both the basic realizations of Hungarian vowels and their realizations as neutral vowels (schwas), as well as on the design, implementation, and evaluation of a set of algorithms for the recognition of both types of realizations from the speech waveform. The authors address the question whether schwas form a unified group of vowels or they show some dependence on the originally intended articulation of the vowel they stand for. The acoustic study uses a database consisting of over 4,000 utterances extracted from continuous speech, and recorded from 19 speakers. The authors propose methods for the recognition of neutral vowels depending on the various vowels they replace in spontaneous speech. Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients are calculated and used for the training of Hidden Markov Models. The recognition system was trained on 2,500 utterances and then tested on 1,500 utterances. The results show that a neutral vowel can be detected in 72% of all occurrences. Stressed and unstressed syllables can be distinguished in 92% of all cases. Neutralized vowels do not form a unified group of phoneme realizations. The pronunciation of schwa heavily depends on the original articulation configuration of the intended vowel

Pausing Strategies In Discourse In Dutch

This paper describes an experiment in which the different pausing strategies in discourse in Dutch were investigated. Spontaneous discourses were recorded from four male and four female native Dutch speakers. Silent and filled pauses were located in the speech signal, as well as lengthened words. These were subsequently related to different discourse structures, obtained independently from prosodic features. Results show that there are basically three different types of pausing: silent pauses, filled pauses, and lengthening of words. Speakers apply these means in different ways to achieve pausing, by using one specific pause type or a combination of more than one. The way of applying pausing is rather uniform within one speaker, whereas the choice of a particular strategy is largely speaker dependent

Number And Duration Of Spoken Utterances Of Deaf And Normally Hearing Children Between Twelve And Eighteen Months - Some preliminary results

Several studies about the speech development of deaf children suggest that their speech development differs from that of normally hearing children. To establish in which respect this development differs and from what age onwards, the spoken utterances of deaf and normally hearing children from 12.5 until 17.5 months of age are studied. This paper reports about some preliminary results of a study on the total number of spoken utterances in a 10-minutes period of monthly recordings and on the average duration of 50 utterances in the speech of deaf and normally hearing children. It became clear that at this age there are already some differences between deaf and normally hearing children. 1 Introduction Many studies indicate that the auditory perception influences the production of speech as early as in the first year of life. This is concluded along studies that compared the speech of normally hearing children with that of hearing impaired children. It seems that already early in the sp..