• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.91-99
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• 2014

Speaking styles tend to have an influence on spectral characteristics of produced speech. There are not many studies on the spectral characteristics of speech because of complicated processing of too much spectral data. The purpose of this study was to examine spectral characteristics and formant bandwidths of English vowels produced by nine American males with different speaking styles: clear or conversational styles; high- or low-pitched voices. Praat was used to collect pitch-corrected long-term averaged spectra and bandwidths of the first two formants of eleven vowels in the speaking styles. Results showed that the spectral characteristics of the vowels varied systematically according to the speaking styles. The clear speech showed higher spectral energy of the vowels than that of the conversational speech while the high-pitched voice did the same over the low-pitched voice. In addition, front and back vowel groups showed different spectral characteristics. Secondly, there was no statistically significant difference between B1 and B2 in the speaking styles. B1 was generally lower than B2 when reflecting the source spectrum and radiation effect. However, there was a statistically significant difference in B2 between the front and back vowel groups. The author concluded that spectral characteristics reflect speaking styles systematically while bandwidths measured at a few formant frequency points do not reveal style differences properly. Further studies would be desirable to examine how people would evaluate different sets of synthetic vowels with spectral characteristics or with bandwidths modified.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.1-10
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• 2018

This study introduces an automated Praat script allowing optimal formant analysis for children's vowels. Using Burg's algorithm in Praat, formants can be extracted by setting the maximum formant value and the number of formants. The optimal formant setting was determined by identifying the two conditions, F1 and F2, with minimum standard deviations. When applying the optimal formant setting determined by the script, the results of normality tests were not significant among all vowels except /e/ for the maximum formant value, and among the vowels /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ and /ʌ/ for the number of formants. This indicates that when analyzing the formants of children's vowel sounds, the unilateral application of a parameter setting (the maximum formant value and the number of formants) to all vowels is problematic. The performance of the optimal formant setting script was evaluated along with 3 different algorithm in order to determine whether it properly extracts formants for children's vowels. To this end, Korean monophghongs of 6-year-old children were collected and the Praat scripts were applied to the data. Resultant Formant plots and statistical analysis showed that optimum_script and qtone_script, which links to the perceptual unit, performed very well in formant extraction compared to the remaining 2 scripts.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.1-8
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• 2019

Formant trajectories reflect the continuous variation of speakers' articulatory movements over time. This study examined formant trajectories of English vowels produced by ninety-three American men and women; the values were normalized using the scale function in R and compared using generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs). Praat was used to read the sound data of Hillenbrand et al. (1995). A formant analysis script was prepared, and six formant values at the corresponding time points within each vowel segment were collected. The results indicate that women yielded proportionately higher formant values than men. The standard deviations of each group showed similar patterns at the first formant (F1) and the second formant (F2) axes and at the measurement points. R was used to scale the first two formant data sets of men and women separately. GAMMs of all the scaled formant data produced various patterns of deviation along the measurement points. Generally, more group difference exists in F1 than in F2. Also, women's trajectories appear more dynamic along the vertical and horizontal axes than those of men. The trajectories are related acoustically to F1 and F2 and anatomically to jaw opening and tongue position. We conclude that scaling and nonlinear testing are useful tools for pinpointing differences between speaker group's formant trajectories. This research could be useful as a foundation for future studies comparing curvilinear data sets.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.2203-2208
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• 2011

This study was to examine the change of vowel acoustic characteristics of the temporomandibular joint disorder patients by maintaining normal vocalization pattern of the temporomandibular joint through increasing the range of motion, that was, the oral cavity sonorant cavity of the temporomandibular joint, related to vowel articulation through temporomandibular training using the physical therapy. The subjects of this study were 3 male adults in 20-30s that were diagnosed with temporomandibular joint disorder. As a result of conducting temporomandibular training program using the physical therapy, the $1^{st}$ Formant Frequency(F1), $2^{nd}$ Formant Frequency(F2), and Fundamental Frequency(F0) of the temporomandibular joint disorder patients were increased compared to before and this showed the change of the $1^{st}$ Formant Frequency(F1) related to the open mouth grade of a vowel, as well as the $2^{nd}$ Formant Frequency(F2), and Fundamental Frequency(F0) related to the front-back of a vowel which shows the relationship between the temporomandibular joint, vowels and voice calculation.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.75-83
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• 2017

The purpose of this study is to find clues to the risk of voice disorders in soprano students. The subjects of the study were 17 soprano students and 18 general students (women). The phonation of vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/ with C4 and F4 notes in each group were recorded. Then, only soprano students were made to record their classical vocalization containing vibrato. Formant, formant energy, bandwidth, VAI (vowel area index), VSA (vowel space area) and L/H ratio were analyzed. There was significant difference in F3 such that the singers' note was measured around 3 kHz which seems to be 400 Hz higher than one from general students. But, There was no significant difference in L/H ratio between soprano student and the general student. There was a significant difference in F3 in the comparison of the soprano students' two vocalization methods. Classical vocalization was measured at 200Hz higher than sustained phonation in F3. Vocal tract adjustment was made and vowel space changed, but there was no significant difference in F3 energy, which is the index of singers' formant according to the phonation method. The L/H ratio, which can be a direct indicator of vocal effort, has no difference in phonation method and is lowered in all phonation methods as the pitch increases. C4 and F4 pitches are lower than the singing range of the soprano. When the pitch changes, vocal effort increases like a general student which will be an indicator of the risk of vocalization. This will be a clue to the vocalization of the immature soprano student.

• MALSORI
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• no.33_34
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• pp.111-125
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• 1997

This experimental phonetic analysis aims to describe standard Korean simple vowels with a view to presenting the vowel quality change from generation to generation, especially between the 50's and the 20's. This change reflects that the contemporary vowel system has both stable and unstable aspect: the former can be affirmed in the vowels with extreme positions in the vowel quadrilateral. and the latter in some vowels(e.g.,'ㅔ/ㅐ') which have the non-quantal vowel characteristics in the current vowel system. Formant values are measured to show these. And the results of acoustic analysis are presented graphically in the vowel quadrilateral for the convenience' sake. The comparison between the articulatory vowel quadrilateral and the acoustic one shows a lot concerning the current vowel quality change.

• MALSORI
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• no.33_34
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• pp.57-69
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• 1997

In this paper, 1 will try to examine the aspects of formants, based on the LPC analysis. In this analysis, five Japanese vowels (a, i, u, e, o) will experience two kinds of experiments: vowels in isolated forms, and vowels in carrier sentences. The analysis results of Japanese vowels of the Japanese natives show a peculiar feature that Japanese vowels form respective vowel groups. Each Japanese vowel makes a statistically significant difference. In the Fl analysis of the vowels grouped by the informant's sex, Japanese vowel (a) shows the greatest standard deviation without regard to the informant's sex. In the F2 analysis of Japanese vowels, each vowel has a statistically significant difference. The fact that the male's [u] shows great standard deviation means that there is a great difference of the frontness of the tongue among the Japanese males in articulating [u]. Isolated vowels and carried vowels show statistically little significance between Fl and F2 frequency values. In another contrastive analysis between the isolated vowel group and the carried vowel group, whether a vowel is articulated in isolation or in a sentence appears to have little effect on its formant frequency.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.29-35
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• 2012

The purpose of this study was to measure the first two vowel formants of the forty male and female speakers (twenty young vs. old male speakers and twenty young vs. old female speakers) from the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech and to examine the vowel formant changes across two generations (younger vs. older). The results indicated that the vowel space of the younger generation (in their thirties or less) shifted to the lower left position compared to those of the older generation (in their forties or more) in both male and female speakers. When the results were compared to those of Peterson & Barney (1952), it appears that differences can be found in the size of the vowel spaces through time.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.95-102
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• 2015

The purpose of this paper is to extract the vowel formants of the ten adult male speakers in their twenties and thirties from the Korean Corpus of Spontaneous Speech [4], also known as the Seoul corpus, and to analyze them by comparing to earlier works on the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1] in terms of the various linguistic factors that are expected to affect the formant distribution. The vowels extracted from the Korean corpus were also compared to those of the read Korean. The results showed that the distribution of the vowel formants from the Korean corpus was very different from that of read Korean speech. The comparison with English corpus and read English speech showed similar patterns. The factors affecting the Korean vowel formants were the interviewer sex, the location of the target vowel or the syllable containing it with respect to the phrasal word or utterance and the speech rate of the surrounding words.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.203-212
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• 2007

This study was to compare some acoustic characteristics of vowels produced by children with cochlear implant (CI) and the children with normal hearing. 20 subjects under ten years old were further classified into two groups (one group of CI children under four years old and the other group of CI children over four years old). For the normal hearing group, 20 subjects are participated in the experiment. Some acoustic parameters including fundamental frequency (F0) and formant frequencies (F1, F2) were measured in the two groups according to the age of cochlear implant operation. For the CI group, three comer vowels (/a/, /i/, /u/) were recorded five times in isolation and analyzed with Multi-Speech (Kay Elemetrics, model 3700), and two independent t-tests on their formant data were conducted using SPSS 11.5. The result showed that the implanted group over four years had a significant difference in F0 and F1 comparing with the implanted group under four years of age as well as the normal hearing group. Those values of the children with the implanted group under four years old were closer to those of the children with the normal hearing. As to the F2, there was no significant difference among implanted groups. However, it was shown that the vowel space for the implanted groups regardless the operation age indicated much smaller than that for the normal hearing children. This acoustic results suggest that CI surgery would be much more effective if it is done under the age of four years old.