• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.19-26
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• 2011

Previous laboratory studies have shown that prosodic structures are encoded in the modulations of phonetic patterns of speech including suprasegmental as well as segmental features. Drawing on a prosodically annotated large-scale speech data from the Buckeye corpus of conversational speech of American English, the current study first evaluated the reliability of prosody annotation by a large number of ordinary listeners and later examined whether and how prosodic prominence influences the phonetic realization of multiple acoustic parameters in everyday conversational speech. The results showed that all the measures of acoustic parameters including pitch, loudness, duration, and spectral balance are increased when heard as prominent. These findings suggest that prosodic prominence enhances the phonetic characteristics of the acoustic parameters. The results also showed that the degree of phonetic enhancement vary depending on the types of the acoustic parameters. With respect to the formant structure, the findings from the present study more consistently support Sonority Expansion Hypothesis than Hyperarticulation Hypothesis, showing that the lexically stressed vowels are hyperarticulated only when hyperarticulation does not interfere with sonority expansion. Taken all into account, the present study showed that prosodic prominence modulates the phonetic realization of the acoustic parameters to the direction of the phonetic strengthening in everyday conversational speech and ordinary listeners are attentive to such phonetic variation associated with prosody in speech perception. However, the present study also showed that in everyday conversational speech there is no single dominant acoustic measure signaling prosodic prominence and listeners must attend to such small acoustic variation or integrate acoustic information from multiple acoustic parameters in prosody perception.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.353-358
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• 2012

This paper describes acoustic phonetic parameters for detecting nasal place in a knowledge-based speech recognition system. Initial acoustic phonetic parameters are selected by studying nasal production mechanisms which are radiation of the sound through the nasal cavity. Nasals are produced with differing articulatory configuration which can be classified by measuring acoustic phonetic parameters such as band energy ratio, band energy differences, formants and formant differences. These acoustic phonetic parameters were tested in a classification experiment among labial nasal, alveolar nasal and velar nasal. An overall classification rate of 57.5% is obtained using the proposed acoustic phonetic parameters on the TIMIT database.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.117-122
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• 2009

A variety of cross-linguistic studies has documented that the acoustic properties of speech addressed to young children include exaggeration of pitch contours and acoustically salient features of phonetic units. It has been suggested that phonetic modifications of child-directed speech facilitate young children's learning of speech sounds by providing detailed phonetic information about the target word. While there are several studies reporting vowel modifications in speech to infants (i.e., hyper-articulated vowels), there has been little research about consonant modifications in speech to young children (except for VOT). The present study examines acoustic properties of Korean stops in Korean mothers' speech to their children (seven children aged 27 to 38 months). Korean tense, lax, and aspirated stops are all voiceless in word-initial position, and are perceptually differentiated by several acoustic parameters including VOT, $f_0$ of the following vowel, and the amplitude difference of the first and second harmonics at the voice onset of the following vowel. This study compares values of these parameters in Korean child-directed speech to those in adult-directed speech from same speakers. Conclusions focus on the acoustic properties of Korean stops in child-directed speech and how they are modified to help Korean young children learn the three-way phonetic contrast.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.3-16
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• 2003

ㆍAcoustic characteristics of stops in speech with contextual variability ㆍPosibility of stop recognition by post processing technique ㆍFurther work - Speech database - Modification of decoder - automatic segmentation of acoustic parameters

• MALSORI
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• no.57
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• pp.73-84
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• 2006

The purpose of this study was to explore the acoustic characteristics of sexy voice. In this study, we measured acoustic parameters (fundamental frequency, jitter, shimmer, and nasalance) of a sustained vowel sound produced by 40 actors (20 males and 20 females) and 40 non-actors (20 males and 20 females). Digital audio recordings were made in the sustained vowel |a| for acoustic analyses using Praat (version 4.1.9) and Nasal View (version 4.5). Twenty voice pathologists participated in the listening experiment and judged the degree of sexiness on a 7-point scale. The results showed that fundamental frequency, shimmer and nasalance had significant differences between actors and non-actors. The acoustic parameters of sexy voice matched perceptual aspects of a previous study: Low fundamental frequency-low pitch and high shimmer-husky voice. On the other hand, the nasalance score did not match that of the previous study: Decreased nasalance had a higher score on sexiness scale judged by the listeners. It would be desirable to study the voice quality by analyzing and controlling more acoustic and auditory parameters for practical applications in the future.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2004.05a
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• pp.219-222
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• 2004

The purpose of this study was to determine a correlation between acoustic and perceptual parameters of the singing voice in singing students and compare them with the results with previous studies, and a more sensitive parameters in analyzing professional vocal usage. This study measured acoustic and perceptual parameters in 41 singing students. Digital audio recordings were made in sung vowels acoustic analysis. Each sample was judged by 1 experienced singing teacher and 1 voice pathologist on two semantic bipolar 7-point scales (ringing-dull, rich-thin). The results showed that SPP1 (p<0.01), SPP2 (p<0.01), and P1(p<0.01) had significant correlations with ringing and richness quality.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.58-62
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• 1999

This paper proposes use of acoustic parameters to improve the discriminability among digit models in Korean connected digit recognition. The proposed method used the logarithmic values of energy ratio between the predetermined frequency bands as additional feature parameters, based on the acoustic-phonetic knowledge. The results of our experiment show that the proposed method reduced the error rate by 46% in comparison with the baseline system. And incorporation of channel compensation technique in the proposed method yielded error reduction of about 69%.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.177-189
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• 2000

This paper investigates how individual speakers' speech can be distinguished using acoustic parameters such as amplitude, pitch, and formant frequencies. Word samples from fifteen male speakers in their 20's in three different regions were recorded in two different modes (i.e., casual and clear speech) in quiet settings, and were analyzed with a Praat macro scrip. In order to determine individual speakers' acoustical values, the total duration of voicing segments was measured in five different timepoints. Results showed that a high correlation coefficient between $F_1\;and\;F_2$ in formant frequency was found among the speakers although there was little correlation coefficient between amplitude and pitch. Statistical grouping shows that individual speakers' voices were not reflected in regional dialects for both casual and clear speech. In addition, the difference of maximum and minimum in amplitude was about 10 dB which indicates a perceptually audible degree. These acoustic data can give some meaningful guidelines for implementing algorithms of speaker identification and speaker verification.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.167-173
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• 2013

This work examines classification of diphthongs, as part of a distinctive feature-based speech recognition system. Acoustic measurements related to the vocal tract and the voice source are examined, and analysis of variance (ANOVA) results show that vowel duration, energy trajectory, and formant variation are significant. A balanced error rate of 17.8% is obtained for 2-way diphthong classification on the TIMIT database, and error rates of 32.9%, 29.9%, and 20.2% are obtained for /aw/, /ay/, and /oy/, for 4-way classification, respectively. Adding the acoustic features to widely used Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients also improves classification.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.95-104
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• 2012

Thyroidectomy patients may have vocal paralysis or paresis, resulting in a breathy voice. The aim of this study was to investigate the aerodynamic and acoustic characteristics of a breathy voice in thyroidectomy patients. Thirty-five subjects who have vocal paralysis after thyroidectomy participated in this study. According to perceptual judgements by three speech pathologists and one phonetic scholar, subjects were divided into two groups: breathy voice group (n = 21) and non-breathy voice group (n = 14). Aerodynamic analysis was conducted by three tasks (Voicing Efficiency, Maximum Sustained Phonation, Vital Capacity) and acoustic analysis was measured during Maximum Sustained Phonation task. The breathy voice group had significantly higher subglottal pressure and more pathological voice characteristics than the non breathy voice group. Showing 94.1% classification accuracy in result logistic regression of aerodynamic analysis, the predictor parameters for breathiness were maximum sound pressure level, sound pressure level range, phonation time of Maximum Sustained Phonation task and Pitch range, peak air pressure, and mean peak air pressure of Voicing Efficiency task. Classification accuracy of acoustic logistic regression was 88.6%, and five frequency perturbation parameters were shown as predictors. Vocal paralysis creates air turbulence at the glottis. It fluctuates frequency-related parameters and increases aspiration in high frequency areas. These changes determine perceptual breathiness.