• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.7-27
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• 2003

Esophageal Speech uses the esophageal air during phonation. Fluent esophageal speakers frequently intake air in oral communication, but unskilled esophageal speakers are difficult with swallowing lots of air. The purpose of this study was to investigate the difference of acoustic characteristics of vowel and consonants production according to the speech proficiency level in esophageal speech. 13 normal male speakers and 13 male esophageal speakers (5 unskilled esophageal speakers, 8 skilled esophageal speakers) with age ranging from 50 to 70 years old. The stimuli were sustained /a/ vowel and 36 meaningless two syllable words. Used vowel is /a/ and consonants were 18 : /k, n, t, m, p, s, c, $C^{h},\;k^{h},\;t^{h},\;p^{h}$, h, I, k', t', p', s', c'/. Fundermental frequency (Fx), Jitter, shimmer, HNR, MPT were measured with by electroglottography using Lx speech studio (Laryngograph Ltd, London, UK). 36 meaningless words produced by esophageal speakers were presented to 3 speech-language pathologists who phonetically transcribed their responses. Fx, Jitter, HNR parameters is significant different between skilled esophageal speakers and unskilled esophageal speakers (P<.05). Considering manner of articulation, ANOVA showed that differences in two esophageal speech groups on speech proficiency were significant; Glide had the highest number of confusion with the other phoneme class, affricates are the most intelligible in the unskilled esophageal speech group, whereas in the skilled esophageal speech group fricatives resulted highest number of confusions, nasals are the most intelligible. In the place of articulation, glottal /h/ is the highest confusion consonant in both groups. Bilabials are the most intelligible in the skilled esophageal speech, velars are the most intelligible in the unskilled esophageal speech. In the structure of syllable, 'CV+V' is more confusion in the skilled esophageal group, unskilled esophageal speech group has similar confusion in both structures. In unskilled esophageal speech, significantly different Fx, Jitter, HNR acoustic parameters of vowel and the highest confusions of Liquid, Nasals consonants could be attributed to unstable, improper contact of neoglottis as vibratory source and insufficiency in the phonatory air supply, and higher motoric demand of remaining articulation due to morphological characteristics of vocal tract after laryngectomy.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.361-373
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• 2002

In this paper, we propose a channel normalization method to improve the performance of CMS (cepstral mean subtraction) which is widely adopted to normalize a channel variation for speech and speaker recognition. CMS which estimates the channel effects by averaging long-term cepstrum has a weak point that the estimated channel is biased by the formants of voiced speech which include a useful speech information. The proposed Formant-broadened Cepstral Mean Subtraction (FBCMS) is based on the facts that the formants can be found easily in log spectrum which is transformed from the cepstrum by fourier transform and the formants correspond to the dominant poles of all-pole model which is usually modeled vocal tract. The FBCMS evaluates only poles to be broadened from the log spectrum without polynomial factorization and makes a formant-broadened cepstrum by broadening the bandwidths of formant poles. We can estimate the channel cepstrum effectively by averaging formant-broadened cepstral coefficients. We performed the experiments to compare FBCMS with CMS, PFCMS using 4 simulated telephone channels. In the experiment of channel estimation, we evaluated the distance cepstrum of real channel from the cepstrum of estimated channel and found that we were able to get the mean cepstrum closer to the channel cepstrum due to an softening the bias of mean cepstrum to speech. In the experiment of text-independent speaker identification, we showed the result that the proposed method was superior than the conventional CMS and comparable to the pole-filtered CMS. Consequently, we showed the proposed method was efficiently able to normalize the channel variation based on the conventional CMS.