This study was concerned with the short vowels in modern standard Arabic words with Consonant Vowel-Consonant Vowel-Consonant Vowel (CVCVCV) structure, and the long vowels in words with Consonant Vowel Vowel-Consonant...This study was concerned with the short vowels in modern standard Arabic words with Consonant Vowel-Consonant Vowel-Consonant Vowel (CVCVCV) structure, and the long vowels in words with Consonant Vowel Vowel-Consonant (CVVC). Even though there has been a dispute on the precise number of Arabic vowels that exist between language studies, this study used the opinion that the Arabic language has three vowels;the elongation of each vowel gave the other three because this is the opinion of classical Arabic linguists which is the source of the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Studies said that the first and second formant values (F1, F2) can represent the vowels. In this study, the formants were measured using LPC (Linear Predictive Coding), verifying the measurement to see if the measured follows the pattern of formants measurements of the other studies, and the formants were used to investigate the relationship between short and long vowels. Furthermore, the study figured out if the dialect of speakers can affect the values of formants, even if the spoken language is MSA, some statistical measurements were calculated to evaluate the relationship.展开更多
Arabic texts suffer from missing short vowels. Arabic Speech Recognition is not as good as English speech recognition due to the short vowels not being recognized. And the Arabic language is unlike the English languag...Arabic texts suffer from missing short vowels. Arabic Speech Recognition is not as good as English speech recognition due to the short vowels not being recognized. And the Arabic language is unlike the English language in characteristics such as the number of vowels. English has more than 24 vowels that are close to each other in pronunciation. The Arabic language only has three short vowels that are far from each other in utter and measurement, by elongating those short vowels, long vowels arose. Researchers said that the vowels could be recognized using formants. The formants’ measurements of Arabic vowels are far from each other too, so it is possible to recognize them so that Arabic Speech recognition can give more accurate results. The paper applies this idea to the corpus Phonemes of Arabic. It uses the Euclidian distance method to measure the distances between formant values to recognize Arabic from words with a CV3 structure, the Linear Predictive Coding method and MATLAB to develop the programs that will extract the formants and calculate the means of the short vowels by using the corpus to identify the short vowels within words in the corpus. The results showed that if highly qualified readers were chosen to read the Arabic text, then higher rates of recognition of the short vowels involved in words will be achieved. This paper revealed that some of the characteristics of a language can be utilized for vowel recognition or to enhance the existing methods for speech recognition.展开更多
Rhythm Formant Theory(RFT),a modulation-theoretic approach to the physical modelling of speech rhythm,is described and applied in an exploratory analysis of the rhetorical rhythms of read-aloud Mandarin Chinese transl...Rhythm Formant Theory(RFT),a modulation-theoretic approach to the physical modelling of speech rhythm,is described and applied in an exploratory analysis of the rhetorical rhythms of read-aloud Mandarin Chinese translations of the IPA benchmark text The North Wind and the Sun.Rhythm Formant Analysis(RFA),a methodology for empirically investigating Rhythm Formant Theory without prior annotation of the speech signal,is presented in some detail,with the aim of studying rhythm variation in larger units throughout longer texts,rather than restricting analysis to words,phrases and sentences.A test case of read-aloud narratives was investigated,with the null hypothesis that male and female readers do not differ in rhetorical reading strategies.RFA was used to generate vectors of low frequency(LF)variation in spectrograms,for analysis with hierarchical clustering methods.The clustering indicates that the null hypothesis was falsified and rhetorical differences between female and male speakers were tentatively confirmed.Ongoing work includes the analysis of linguistic factors underlying LF variation.In the conclusion,RFT is placed into a more general framework of a Speech Modulation Frequency Scale of modulation types.展开更多
Vocal individuality is widespread in social animals. Individual variation in vocalizations is a prereq- uisite for discriminating among conspecifics and may have facilitated the evolution of large complex societies. R...Vocal individuality is widespread in social animals. Individual variation in vocalizations is a prereq- uisite for discriminating among conspecifics and may have facilitated the evolution of large complex societies. Ring-tailed lemurs Lemur catta live in relatively large social groups, have con- spicuous vocal repertoires, and their species-specific utterances can be interpreted in light of source-filter theory of vocal production. Indeed, their utterances allow individual discrimination and even recognition thanks to the resonance frequencies of the vocal tract. The purpose of this study is to determine which distinctive vocal features can be derived from the morphology of the upper vocal tract. To accomplish this, we built computational models derived from anatomical measurements collected on lemur cadavers and compared the results with the spectrographic out- put of vocalizations recorded from ex situ live individuals. Our results demonstrate that the mor- phological variation of the ring-tailed lemur vocal tract explains individual distinctiveness of their species-specific utterances. We also provide further evidence that vocal tract modeling is a power- ful tool for studying the vocal output of non-human primates.展开更多
The identification and classification of pathological voice are still a challenging area of research in speech processing. Acoustic features of speech are used mainly to discriminate normal voices from pathological vo...The identification and classification of pathological voice are still a challenging area of research in speech processing. Acoustic features of speech are used mainly to discriminate normal voices from pathological voices. This paper explores and compares various classification models to find the ability of acoustic parameters in differentiating normal voices from pathological voices. An attempt is made to analyze and to discriminate pathological voice from normal voice in children using different classification methods. The classification of pathological voice from normal voice is implemented using Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Radial Basis Functional Neural Network (RBFNN). The normal and pathological voices of children are used to train and test the classifiers. A dataset is constructed by recording speech utterances of a set of Tamil phrases. The speech signal is then analyzed in order to extract the acoustic parameters such as the Signal Energy, pitch, formant frequencies, Mean Square Residual signal, Reflection coefficients, Jitter and Shimmer. In this study various acoustic features are combined to form a feature set, so as to detect voice disorders in children based on which further treatments can be prescribed by a pathologist. Hence, a successful pathological voice classification will enable an automatic non-invasive device to diagnose and analyze the voice of the patient.展开更多
The acoustic characteristics or the chinese vowels of 24 children with cleft palate and 10 normal control children were analyzed by computerized speech signal processing system (CSSPS),and the speech articulation was ...The acoustic characteristics or the chinese vowels of 24 children with cleft palate and 10 normal control children were analyzed by computerized speech signal processing system (CSSPS),and the speech articulation was judged with Glossary of clert palate speech(GCPS).The listening judgement showed that the speech articulation was significantly different between the two groups(P<0.01).The objective quantitative measurement suggested that the formant pattern(FP)of vowels in children with cleft palate was different from that of normal control children except vowel[a](P< 0.05).The acoustic vowelgraph or the Chinese vowels which demonstrated directly the relationship of vocal space and speech perception was stated with the first formant frequence(F1)and the second formant frequence(F2).The authors conclude that the values or F1 and F2 point out the upward and backward tongue movement to close the clert, which reflects the vocal characteristics of trausmission of clert palate speech.展开更多
In order to improve the Mandarin vowel pronunciation quality assessment, a nox/el formant feature was proposed and applied to formant classification for Chinese Mandarin vowel pronunciation quality evaluation. Formant...In order to improve the Mandarin vowel pronunciation quality assessment, a nox/el formant feature was proposed and applied to formant classification for Chinese Mandarin vowel pronunciation quality evaluation. Formant candidates of each frame were plotted on the time-frequency plane to form a bitmap, and its Gabor feature was extracted to represent the formant trajectory. The feature was then classified by using GMM model and the classification posterior probability was mapped to pronunciation quality grade. The experiments of comparing the Gabor transformation based formant trajectory feature with several other kinds of traditionally used features show that with this method, a human-machine scoring correlation coefficient （CC） of 0.842 can be achieved, which is better than the result of 0.832 by traditional speech recognition techniques. At the same time, considering that the long-term information of formant classification and the short-term information of speech recognition technique are complementary to each other, it is investigated to combine their results with linear or nonlinear methods to further improve the evaluation performance. As a result, experiments on PSK show that the best CC of 0.913, which is very close to the correlation of inter-human rating of 0.94, is gotten by using neural network.展开更多
Objective To establish an acoustic perceptual method analyzing the compensatory articulation errors in children with operated cleft palate via the formants of Chinese pure vowels. Methods The first three formants whic...Objective To establish an acoustic perceptual method analyzing the compensatory articulation errors in children with operated cleft palate via the formants of Chinese pure vowels. Methods The first three formants which represent vocal transmission character in Chinese pure vowels of 84 subjects with operated cleft palate, were measured by Computerized Speech Signal Processing System (CSSPS). The Chinese vowel graph of postoperative patients with cleft palate was stated by the first formant frequencies (F1) and the second formant frequencies (F2) of the Chinese pure vowels between the two groups. Results Values of F1 and F2 of vowels except [a] in the poor articulation group (Group A) were significantly different from those in the good articulation group (Group B) (P<0.05 or P<0.01). As compared with that in Group B, the vowel graph demonstrated the decreased perceptual distances in Group A. These findings indicated that there might still be the backward movements of tongue, perverted mandibular movements and disharmonious lip movements in addition to the velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI) in Group A. Conclusion The speech articulation of children with repaired cleft palate should be gained by correcting the aberrant compensatory articulation errors in the condition of velopharyngeal competence. Computerized Speech Signal Processing System (CSSPS), which is regarded as the content of objective quantitative measurement, is a precise, simple, reliable and atroumatic technique for children with cleft palate to analyze pathological compensatory articulation errors.展开更多
A new type of vocoder system based upon formant analysis is presented in this paper. The LMS adaptive algorithm is used for tracking formants of speech signals. The results of computer simulation show that the new voc...A new type of vocoder system based upon formant analysis is presented in this paper. The LMS adaptive algorithm is used for tracking formants of speech signals. The results of computer simulation show that the new vocoder has better synthesized speech quality.展开更多
To achieve efficient a d compact low-dimensional features for speech emotion recognition,a novel featurereduction method using uncertain linear discriminant analysis is proposed.Using the same principles as for conven...To achieve efficient a d compact low-dimensional features for speech emotion recognition,a novel featurereduction method using uncertain linear discriminant analysis is proposed.Using the same principles as for conventional linear discriminant analysis(LDA),uncertainties of the noisy or distorted input data ae employed in order to estimate maximaiy discriminant directions.The effectiveness of the proposed uncertain LDA(ULDA)is demonstrated in the Uyghur speech emotion recognition task.The emotional features of Uyghur speech,especially,the fundamental fequency and formant,a e analyzed in the collected emotional data.Then,ULDA is employed in dimensionality reduction of emotional features and better performance is achieved compared with other dimensionality reduction techniques.The speech emotion recognition of Uyghur is implemented by feeding the low-dimensional data to support vector machine(SVM)based on the proposed ULDA.The experimental results show that when employing a appropriate uncertainty estimation algorithm,uncertain LDA outperforms the conveetional LDA counterpart on Uyghur speech emotion recognition.展开更多
In this study we established a microcomputer based on speech signal processing system and changes of formant frequencies of the vowels/i/accompany the changes in the oral cavity after maxillary surgery and prosthodont...In this study we established a microcomputer based on speech signal processing system and changes of formant frequencies of the vowels/i/accompany the changes in the oral cavity after maxillary surgery and prosthodontic reconstruction. The study found the first formant frequency, for vowel/i/ has no change, while the second formant frequency peak significantly shifted between the preprosthetic and postprosthetic speaking condition after anterior resection of maxillae, and found there is the correlation between the calculation of relative energy error value and the speech intelligible measured aurally (P【0.05).展开更多
This paper investigates the differences between vowels [i] and [ I] pronounced by Chinese English speakers and American English speakers. Seven people consisting of two natives and five Chinese have read a list of sen...This paper investigates the differences between vowels [i] and [ I] pronounced by Chinese English speakers and American English speakers. Seven people consisting of two natives and five Chinese have read a list of sentences and their voices were recorded. A software program is used to analyze their voices. In spectrograms generated by Praat, the connection between formant values and articulation features is used to investigate how native speakers pronounce these two vowels and what the differences are between native speakers and Chinese speakers. Through this investigation, it is discovered that Chinese speakers have lower tongue position in [i] and their tongues are more forward in [I], thus making it hard to differentiate these two vowels. Moreover, the length of [i] is much shorter than those in American pronunciation, suggesting that Chinese speakers differentiate [i] and [I] largely by length. However, the comparison of Chinese speakers and native speakers proved otherwise.展开更多
Feature parameters extraction is critical for speaker recognition research. The paper presents the function of pitch, formant and Mel frequency central coefficient (MFCC) in speaker recognition. It can increase the id...Feature parameters extraction is critical for speaker recognition research. The paper presents the function of pitch, formant and Mel frequency central coefficient (MFCC) in speaker recognition. It can increase the identification rate effectively for feature parameter sorts the speech corpus. Using Euclid Distance to compare feature parameters is very effective.展开更多
This study describes the vowel system of EkeGusii(“Bantu E.42”)(Guthrie,1948)in an acoustic phonetics perspective using oral data got from purposively sampled subjects:four adult males,four adult females and four ch...This study describes the vowel system of EkeGusii(“Bantu E.42”)(Guthrie,1948)in an acoustic phonetics perspective using oral data got from purposively sampled subjects:four adult males,four adult females and four children(two boys and two girls all 8 years old)equally from the two dialects of EkeGusii(EkeMaate and EkeRogoro Dialects).In order to capture the distribution characteristics of the vowel acoustic concentration,the group frequency means are normalized using Lobanov’s(1971)algorithm.Two viewpoints are the subjects of analysis in EkeGusii vowels:(a)acoustic vowel space as projected by the intersection of F2 vs.F1 or quadrilateral,and(b)spatial features of high,low,front and back.These qualities are mainly influenced by the physiology of speakers and social variability as occasioned by gender,age and dialect.The results indicate that children have no gender difference in formants,and have the highest frequencies for all formants,followed by adult females and then adult males.Furthermore,acoustic vowel space and spatial features are affected by gender,age,and dialect.A vowel pattern,replicated by all informants,is realized in the dispersion of the vowels within the chart influenced by gender and age.This study found out that EkeGusii seems to adopt a seven-vowel system of/i eɛaɔo u/with a length contrast.展开更多
A monitoring of multiple physical parameters in a moderate seismic area in Western Piedmont (NW Italy) and the simultaneous observation of the behaviour of numerous species of domestic and wild animals gave in a perio...A monitoring of multiple physical parameters in a moderate seismic area in Western Piedmont (NW Italy) and the simultaneous observation of the behaviour of numerous species of domestic and wild animals gave in a period of over twenty years the possibility to distinguish the unusual animal behaviours due to local earthquake nucleation from other causes. In particular, the observation of the body and vocal language of dogs (Canis familiaris) in the same area has permitted not only to specify the different meanings of vocal language in connection to their body language, but also to classify the minimum elements into a vocal language that is linked together by tonal and rhythmical sequences of sounds that form a semantic lexicon. The usage of the same tonal and rhythmical vocal sequences in similar or identical situations, which are experienced by different groups of dogs, induces us to verify whether it could be possible to link particular vocal sequences to precise physical anomalies before earthquakes. The individuation of physical anomalies due to an earthquake nucleation or due to a hydro-geological destabilization, is possible thanks to a continuous long-term monitoring of some parameters. Moreover, the complexity of the vocal language of dogs increases if the dogs live in an area with a law population density. Then the correlation between some vocal sequences and some seismic precursors is better if dogs live free in yard or on farms, if they are in good health, and if they can establish a strong social relation of group. When dogs live closed in yards of houses that are far apart, they communicate with each other with an amazing vocal language, full of questions and answers, imitations of sequences, and information about situations that may be harmful to them.展开更多
In this study, trans-consonantal vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in Chinese is investigated. The target words are in the form of ＇bVl.ba＇, and the subjects are eight native speakers of standard Chinese. Vowel formants...In this study, trans-consonantal vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in Chinese is investigated. The target words are in the form of ＇bVl.ba＇, and the subjects are eight native speakers of standard Chinese. Vowel formants are examined at the onset, middle and offset points of the target vowel. Results show that trans-segmental coarticulation exists in Chinese, at the onset point of the target vowel, and in Chinese, coarticulatory effect does not extend to the middle point of the vowel.展开更多
On the basis of the pulse source-system model, a convenient and effective method used to evaluate the transfer function of human pulse system has been proposed by using the principle of signal detection and system ana...On the basis of the pulse source-system model, a convenient and effective method used to evaluate the transfer function of human pulse system has been proposed by using the principle of signal detection and system analysis. The experimental results show that the pulse system of the normal pulse has 3 formants; the smooth pulse, 2 formants; the wiry pulse, 4 formants; and the thready pulse, only 1 formant. Formant frequencies reflect the resonance behaviour of the arterial system.展开更多
This paper proposes a novel voice conversion method by frequency warping. The frequency warping function is generated based on mapping formants of the source speaker and the target speaker. In addition to frequency wa...This paper proposes a novel voice conversion method by frequency warping. The frequency warping function is generated based on mapping formants of the source speaker and the target speaker. In addition to frequency warping, fundamental frequency adjustment, spectral envelope equalization, breathiness addition, and duration modification are also used to improve the similarity to the target speaker. The proposed voice conversion method needs only a very small amount of training data for generating the warping function, thereby greatly facilitating its application. Systems based on the proposed method were used for the 2007 TC-STAR intra-lingual voice conversion evaluation for English and Spanish and a cross-lingual voice conversion evaluation for Spanish. The evaluation results show that the proposed method can achieve a much better quality of converted speech than other methods as well as a good balance between quality and similarity. The IBM1 system was ranked No. 1 for English evaluation and No. 2 for Spanish evaluation. Evaluation results also show that the proposed method is a convenient and competitive method for crosslingual voice conversion tasks.展开更多
The study^1 evaluates the quantal theory by analyzing the articulatory-acoustic relations in the four Cantonese palatal vowels[i:y:i y]through investigating the sensitivity of vowel formant frequencies to variation of...The study^1 evaluates the quantal theory by analyzing the articulatory-acoustic relations in the four Cantonese palatal vowels[i:y:i y]through investigating the sensitivity of vowel formant frequencies to variation of linguo-palatal constriction location and that of constriction size along the vocal tract length during the vowels,using KMA AG5 0 0.The articulatory-acoustic data obtained in this study show non-linear relationship between the up-down and front-back displacements in linguo-palatal constriction during the vowels and the acoustic consequences,which is similar to what the quantal theory claims.Moderate displacements in constriction location and constriction size result in large spectral changes.The level of sensitivity of formant frequencies to variation of tongue displacement is lower for the unrounded[i:i]than the rounded counterparts[y:y],suggesting the quantal nature is more apparent in[i:i]than[y:y].In general,for the Cantonese palatal vowels the levels of sensitivity of F1 to the variation of constriction location and that of constriction size are similar,whereas F2 is more sensitive to the variation of constriction size than to the variation of constriction location.The latter is similar to the articulatory-acoustic relations in the Knglish vowels reported in the previous studies.展开更多
The study^1 investigates dispersion and variability of the vowels of three Chinese dialects,namely Yongding,Cantonese,and Wenling with the three-,seven-,and eleven-vowel systems,respectively.Measurements of formant fr...The study^1 investigates dispersion and variability of the vowels of three Chinese dialects,namely Yongding,Cantonese,and Wenling with the three-,seven-,and eleven-vowel systems,respectively.Measurements of formant frequencies were obtained through spectral analysis of speech data from ten male and ten female speakers of each dialect Results show that a larger vowel inventory correlates a more expanded acoustical vowel space for the three Chinese dialects,which supports the prediction of the vowel dispersion theory that the larger the vowel inventory is,the more expanded vowel space will be.However,the difference in vowel space is not linearly related to the difference in vowel inventory size.Furthermore,the vowel dispersion theory’s prediction that variability in vowel formant frequencies is inversely related to vowel inventory size is not supported by the vowel formant data from the three Chinese dialects.展开更多
文摘This study was concerned with the short vowels in modern standard Arabic words with Consonant Vowel-Consonant Vowel-Consonant Vowel (CVCVCV) structure, and the long vowels in words with Consonant Vowel Vowel-Consonant (CVVC). Even though there has been a dispute on the precise number of Arabic vowels that exist between language studies, this study used the opinion that the Arabic language has three vowels;the elongation of each vowel gave the other three because this is the opinion of classical Arabic linguists which is the source of the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Studies said that the first and second formant values (F1, F2) can represent the vowels. In this study, the formants were measured using LPC (Linear Predictive Coding), verifying the measurement to see if the measured follows the pattern of formants measurements of the other studies, and the formants were used to investigate the relationship between short and long vowels. Furthermore, the study figured out if the dialect of speakers can affect the values of formants, even if the spoken language is MSA, some statistical measurements were calculated to evaluate the relationship.
文摘Arabic texts suffer from missing short vowels. Arabic Speech Recognition is not as good as English speech recognition due to the short vowels not being recognized. And the Arabic language is unlike the English language in characteristics such as the number of vowels. English has more than 24 vowels that are close to each other in pronunciation. The Arabic language only has three short vowels that are far from each other in utter and measurement, by elongating those short vowels, long vowels arose. Researchers said that the vowels could be recognized using formants. The formants’ measurements of Arabic vowels are far from each other too, so it is possible to recognize them so that Arabic Speech recognition can give more accurate results. The paper applies this idea to the corpus Phonemes of Arabic. It uses the Euclidian distance method to measure the distances between formant values to recognize Arabic from words with a CV3 structure, the Linear Predictive Coding method and MATLAB to develop the programs that will extract the formants and calculate the means of the short vowels by using the corpus to identify the short vowels within words in the corpus. The results showed that if highly qualified readers were chosen to read the Arabic text, then higher rates of recognition of the short vowels involved in words will be achieved. This paper revealed that some of the characteristics of a language can be utilized for vowel recognition or to enhance the existing methods for speech recognition.
文摘Rhythm Formant Theory(RFT),a modulation-theoretic approach to the physical modelling of speech rhythm,is described and applied in an exploratory analysis of the rhetorical rhythms of read-aloud Mandarin Chinese translations of the IPA benchmark text The North Wind and the Sun.Rhythm Formant Analysis(RFA),a methodology for empirically investigating Rhythm Formant Theory without prior annotation of the speech signal,is presented in some detail,with the aim of studying rhythm variation in larger units throughout longer texts,rather than restricting analysis to words,phrases and sentences.A test case of read-aloud narratives was investigated,with the null hypothesis that male and female readers do not differ in rhetorical reading strategies.RFA was used to generate vectors of low frequency(LF)variation in spectrograms,for analysis with hierarchical clustering methods.The clustering indicates that the null hypothesis was falsified and rhetorical differences between female and male speakers were tentatively confirmed.Ongoing work includes the analysis of linguistic factors underlying LF variation.In the conclusion,RFT is placed into a more general framework of a Speech Modulation Frequency Scale of modulation types.
文摘Vocal individuality is widespread in social animals. Individual variation in vocalizations is a prereq- uisite for discriminating among conspecifics and may have facilitated the evolution of large complex societies. Ring-tailed lemurs Lemur catta live in relatively large social groups, have con- spicuous vocal repertoires, and their species-specific utterances can be interpreted in light of source-filter theory of vocal production. Indeed, their utterances allow individual discrimination and even recognition thanks to the resonance frequencies of the vocal tract. The purpose of this study is to determine which distinctive vocal features can be derived from the morphology of the upper vocal tract. To accomplish this, we built computational models derived from anatomical measurements collected on lemur cadavers and compared the results with the spectrographic out- put of vocalizations recorded from ex situ live individuals. Our results demonstrate that the mor- phological variation of the ring-tailed lemur vocal tract explains individual distinctiveness of their species-specific utterances. We also provide further evidence that vocal tract modeling is a power- ful tool for studying the vocal output of non-human primates.
文摘The identification and classification of pathological voice are still a challenging area of research in speech processing. Acoustic features of speech are used mainly to discriminate normal voices from pathological voices. This paper explores and compares various classification models to find the ability of acoustic parameters in differentiating normal voices from pathological voices. An attempt is made to analyze and to discriminate pathological voice from normal voice in children using different classification methods. The classification of pathological voice from normal voice is implemented using Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Radial Basis Functional Neural Network (RBFNN). The normal and pathological voices of children are used to train and test the classifiers. A dataset is constructed by recording speech utterances of a set of Tamil phrases. The speech signal is then analyzed in order to extract the acoustic parameters such as the Signal Energy, pitch, formant frequencies, Mean Square Residual signal, Reflection coefficients, Jitter and Shimmer. In this study various acoustic features are combined to form a feature set, so as to detect voice disorders in children based on which further treatments can be prescribed by a pathologist. Hence, a successful pathological voice classification will enable an automatic non-invasive device to diagnose and analyze the voice of the patient.
文摘The acoustic characteristics or the chinese vowels of 24 children with cleft palate and 10 normal control children were analyzed by computerized speech signal processing system (CSSPS),and the speech articulation was judged with Glossary of clert palate speech(GCPS).The listening judgement showed that the speech articulation was significantly different between the two groups(P<0.01).The objective quantitative measurement suggested that the formant pattern(FP)of vowels in children with cleft palate was different from that of normal control children except vowel[a](P< 0.05).The acoustic vowelgraph or the Chinese vowels which demonstrated directly the relationship of vocal space and speech perception was stated with the first formant frequence(F1)and the second formant frequence(F2).The authors conclude that the values or F1 and F2 point out the upward and backward tongue movement to close the clert, which reflects the vocal characteristics of trausmission of clert palate speech.
基金Project(61062011)supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of ChinaProject(2010GXNSFA013128)supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Guangxi Province,China
文摘In order to improve the Mandarin vowel pronunciation quality assessment, a nox/el formant feature was proposed and applied to formant classification for Chinese Mandarin vowel pronunciation quality evaluation. Formant candidates of each frame were plotted on the time-frequency plane to form a bitmap, and its Gabor feature was extracted to represent the formant trajectory. The feature was then classified by using GMM model and the classification posterior probability was mapped to pronunciation quality grade. The experiments of comparing the Gabor transformation based formant trajectory feature with several other kinds of traditionally used features show that with this method, a human-machine scoring correlation coefficient （CC） of 0.842 can be achieved, which is better than the result of 0.832 by traditional speech recognition techniques. At the same time, considering that the long-term information of formant classification and the short-term information of speech recognition technique are complementary to each other, it is investigated to combine their results with linear or nonlinear methods to further improve the evaluation performance. As a result, experiments on PSK show that the best CC of 0.913, which is very close to the correlation of inter-human rating of 0.94, is gotten by using neural network.
基金this work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province (No98SM65)
文摘Objective To establish an acoustic perceptual method analyzing the compensatory articulation errors in children with operated cleft palate via the formants of Chinese pure vowels. Methods The first three formants which represent vocal transmission character in Chinese pure vowels of 84 subjects with operated cleft palate, were measured by Computerized Speech Signal Processing System (CSSPS). The Chinese vowel graph of postoperative patients with cleft palate was stated by the first formant frequencies (F1) and the second formant frequencies (F2) of the Chinese pure vowels between the two groups. Results Values of F1 and F2 of vowels except [a] in the poor articulation group (Group A) were significantly different from those in the good articulation group (Group B) (P<0.05 or P<0.01). As compared with that in Group B, the vowel graph demonstrated the decreased perceptual distances in Group A. These findings indicated that there might still be the backward movements of tongue, perverted mandibular movements and disharmonious lip movements in addition to the velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI) in Group A. Conclusion The speech articulation of children with repaired cleft palate should be gained by correcting the aberrant compensatory articulation errors in the condition of velopharyngeal competence. Computerized Speech Signal Processing System (CSSPS), which is regarded as the content of objective quantitative measurement, is a precise, simple, reliable and atroumatic technique for children with cleft palate to analyze pathological compensatory articulation errors.
文摘A new type of vocoder system based upon formant analysis is presented in this paper. The LMS adaptive algorithm is used for tracking formants of speech signals. The results of computer simulation show that the new vocoder has better synthesized speech quality.
基金The National Natural Science Foundation of China(No.61673108,61231002)
文摘To achieve efficient a d compact low-dimensional features for speech emotion recognition,a novel featurereduction method using uncertain linear discriminant analysis is proposed.Using the same principles as for conventional linear discriminant analysis(LDA),uncertainties of the noisy or distorted input data ae employed in order to estimate maximaiy discriminant directions.The effectiveness of the proposed uncertain LDA(ULDA)is demonstrated in the Uyghur speech emotion recognition task.The emotional features of Uyghur speech,especially,the fundamental fequency and formant,a e analyzed in the collected emotional data.Then,ULDA is employed in dimensionality reduction of emotional features and better performance is achieved compared with other dimensionality reduction techniques.The speech emotion recognition of Uyghur is implemented by feeding the low-dimensional data to support vector machine(SVM)based on the proposed ULDA.The experimental results show that when employing a appropriate uncertainty estimation algorithm,uncertain LDA outperforms the conveetional LDA counterpart on Uyghur speech emotion recognition.
文摘In this study we established a microcomputer based on speech signal processing system and changes of formant frequencies of the vowels/i/accompany the changes in the oral cavity after maxillary surgery and prosthodontic reconstruction. The study found the first formant frequency, for vowel/i/ has no change, while the second formant frequency peak significantly shifted between the preprosthetic and postprosthetic speaking condition after anterior resection of maxillae, and found there is the correlation between the calculation of relative energy error value and the speech intelligible measured aurally (P【0.05).
文摘This paper investigates the differences between vowels [i] and [ I] pronounced by Chinese English speakers and American English speakers. Seven people consisting of two natives and five Chinese have read a list of sentences and their voices were recorded. A software program is used to analyze their voices. In spectrograms generated by Praat, the connection between formant values and articulation features is used to investigate how native speakers pronounce these two vowels and what the differences are between native speakers and Chinese speakers. Through this investigation, it is discovered that Chinese speakers have lower tongue position in [i] and their tongues are more forward in [I], thus making it hard to differentiate these two vowels. Moreover, the length of [i] is much shorter than those in American pronunciation, suggesting that Chinese speakers differentiate [i] and [I] largely by length. However, the comparison of Chinese speakers and native speakers proved otherwise.
文摘Feature parameters extraction is critical for speaker recognition research. The paper presents the function of pitch, formant and Mel frequency central coefficient (MFCC) in speaker recognition. It can increase the identification rate effectively for feature parameter sorts the speech corpus. Using Euclid Distance to compare feature parameters is very effective.
文摘This study describes the vowel system of EkeGusii(“Bantu E.42”)(Guthrie,1948)in an acoustic phonetics perspective using oral data got from purposively sampled subjects:four adult males,four adult females and four children(two boys and two girls all 8 years old)equally from the two dialects of EkeGusii(EkeMaate and EkeRogoro Dialects).In order to capture the distribution characteristics of the vowel acoustic concentration,the group frequency means are normalized using Lobanov’s(1971)algorithm.Two viewpoints are the subjects of analysis in EkeGusii vowels:(a)acoustic vowel space as projected by the intersection of F2 vs.F1 or quadrilateral,and(b)spatial features of high,low,front and back.These qualities are mainly influenced by the physiology of speakers and social variability as occasioned by gender,age and dialect.The results indicate that children have no gender difference in formants,and have the highest frequencies for all formants,followed by adult females and then adult males.Furthermore,acoustic vowel space and spatial features are affected by gender,age,and dialect.A vowel pattern,replicated by all informants,is realized in the dispersion of the vowels within the chart influenced by gender and age.This study found out that EkeGusii seems to adopt a seven-vowel system of/i eɛaɔo u/with a length contrast.
文摘A monitoring of multiple physical parameters in a moderate seismic area in Western Piedmont (NW Italy) and the simultaneous observation of the behaviour of numerous species of domestic and wild animals gave in a period of over twenty years the possibility to distinguish the unusual animal behaviours due to local earthquake nucleation from other causes. In particular, the observation of the body and vocal language of dogs (Canis familiaris) in the same area has permitted not only to specify the different meanings of vocal language in connection to their body language, but also to classify the minimum elements into a vocal language that is linked together by tonal and rhythmical sequences of sounds that form a semantic lexicon. The usage of the same tonal and rhythmical vocal sequences in similar or identical situations, which are experienced by different groups of dogs, induces us to verify whether it could be possible to link particular vocal sequences to precise physical anomalies before earthquakes. The individuation of physical anomalies due to an earthquake nucleation or due to a hydro-geological destabilization, is possible thanks to a continuous long-term monitoring of some parameters. Moreover, the complexity of the vocal language of dogs increases if the dogs live in an area with a law population density. Then the correlation between some vocal sequences and some seismic precursors is better if dogs live free in yard or on farms, if they are in good health, and if they can establish a strong social relation of group. When dogs live closed in yards of houses that are far apart, they communicate with each other with an amazing vocal language, full of questions and answers, imitations of sequences, and information about situations that may be harmful to them.
基金Supported by the National Social Science Found of China(No.09FTQ004)the Social Science Research Project of Guangdong Province(GD11CWW04)+3 种基金the Humanity and Social Science Research Project for Colleges in Guangdong Province(11WYXM012)the sub-project for Huawen Proficiency Test of College of Chinese Language and Culture/Institute of Huawen Education,Jinan University(HC20120602)the 14th Project of Teaching Reform for Under-graduate Education of Jinan Universitythe Project of Teaching Reform for Graduate Education of Jinan University
文摘In this study, trans-consonantal vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in Chinese is investigated. The target words are in the form of ＇bVl.ba＇, and the subjects are eight native speakers of standard Chinese. Vowel formants are examined at the onset, middle and offset points of the target vowel. Results show that trans-segmental coarticulation exists in Chinese, at the onset point of the target vowel, and in Chinese, coarticulatory effect does not extend to the middle point of the vowel.
文摘On the basis of the pulse source-system model, a convenient and effective method used to evaluate the transfer function of human pulse system has been proposed by using the principle of signal detection and system analysis. The experimental results show that the pulse system of the normal pulse has 3 formants; the smooth pulse, 2 formants; the wiry pulse, 4 formants; and the thready pulse, only 1 formant. Formant frequencies reflect the resonance behaviour of the arterial system.
文摘This paper proposes a novel voice conversion method by frequency warping. The frequency warping function is generated based on mapping formants of the source speaker and the target speaker. In addition to frequency warping, fundamental frequency adjustment, spectral envelope equalization, breathiness addition, and duration modification are also used to improve the similarity to the target speaker. The proposed voice conversion method needs only a very small amount of training data for generating the warping function, thereby greatly facilitating its application. Systems based on the proposed method were used for the 2007 TC-STAR intra-lingual voice conversion evaluation for English and Spanish and a cross-lingual voice conversion evaluation for Spanish. The evaluation results show that the proposed method can achieve a much better quality of converted speech than other methods as well as a good balance between quality and similarity. The IBM1 system was ranked No. 1 for English evaluation and No. 2 for Spanish evaluation. Evaluation results also show that the proposed method is a convenient and competitive method for crosslingual voice conversion tasks.
基金supported by a GRF grant(#9041707/CityU 146611)from the Research Grants Council of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region
文摘The study^1 evaluates the quantal theory by analyzing the articulatory-acoustic relations in the four Cantonese palatal vowels[i:y:i y]through investigating the sensitivity of vowel formant frequencies to variation of linguo-palatal constriction location and that of constriction size along the vocal tract length during the vowels,using KMA AG5 0 0.The articulatory-acoustic data obtained in this study show non-linear relationship between the up-down and front-back displacements in linguo-palatal constriction during the vowels and the acoustic consequences,which is similar to what the quantal theory claims.Moderate displacements in constriction location and constriction size result in large spectral changes.The level of sensitivity of formant frequencies to variation of tongue displacement is lower for the unrounded[i:i]than the rounded counterparts[y:y],suggesting the quantal nature is more apparent in[i:i]than[y:y].In general,for the Cantonese palatal vowels the levels of sensitivity of F1 to the variation of constriction location and that of constriction size are similar,whereas F2 is more sensitive to the variation of constriction size than to the variation of constriction location.The latter is similar to the articulatory-acoustic relations in the Knglish vowels reported in the previous studies.
基金supported by a GRF grant(#9041514/CityU#144609)from the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region
文摘The study^1 investigates dispersion and variability of the vowels of three Chinese dialects,namely Yongding,Cantonese,and Wenling with the three-,seven-,and eleven-vowel systems,respectively.Measurements of formant frequencies were obtained through spectral analysis of speech data from ten male and ten female speakers of each dialect Results show that a larger vowel inventory correlates a more expanded acoustical vowel space for the three Chinese dialects,which supports the prediction of the vowel dispersion theory that the larger the vowel inventory is,the more expanded vowel space will be.However,the difference in vowel space is not linearly related to the difference in vowel inventory size.Furthermore,the vowel dispersion theory’s prediction that variability in vowel formant frequencies is inversely related to vowel inventory size is not supported by the vowel formant data from the three Chinese dialects.
