Voice quality variations include a set of voicing sound source modifications ranging from laryngealized to normal to breathy phonation. Analysis of reiterant imitations of two sentences by ten female and six male talkers has shown that the potential acoustic cues to this type of voice quality variation include: (1) increases to the relative amplitude of the fundamental frequency component as open quotient increases; (2) increases to the amount of aspiration noise that replaces higher frequency harmonics as the arytenoids become more separated; (3) increases to lower formant bandwidths; and (4) introduction of extra pole zeros in the vocal-tract transfer function associated with tracheal coupling. Perceptual validation of the relative importance of these cues for signaling a breathy voice quality has been accomplished using a new voicing source model for synthesis of more natural male and female voices. The new formant synthesizer, KLSYN88, is fully documented here. Results of the perception study indicate that, contrary to previous research which emphasizes the importance of increased amplitude of the fundamental component, aspiration noise is perceptually most important. Without its presence, increases to the fundamental component may induce the sensation of nasality in a high-pitched voice. Further results of the acoustic analysis include the observations that: (1) over the course of a sentence, the acoustic manifestations of breathiness vary considerably--tending to increase for unstressed syllables, in utterance-final syllables, and at the margins of voiceless consonants; (2) on average, females are more breathy than males, but there are very large differences between subjects within each gender; (3) many utterances appear to end in a "breathy-laryngealized" type of vibration; and (4) diplophonic irregularities in the timing of glottal periods occur frequently, especially at the end of an utterance. Diplophonia and other deviations from perfect periodicity may be important aspects of naturalness in synthesis.

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Analysis, synthesis, and perception of voice quality variations among female and male talkers

Research on the exploitation of prosodic information in the comprehension of spoken language is reviewed. The research falls into three main areas: the use of prosody in the recognition of spoken words, in which most attention has been paid to the question of whether the prosodic structure of a word plays a role in initial activation of stored lexical representations; the use of prosody in the computation of syntactic structure, in which the resolution of global and local ambiguities has formed the central focus; and the role of prosody in the processing of discourse structure, in which there has been a preponderance of work on the contribution of accentuation and deaccentuation to integration of concepts with an existing discourse model. The review reveals that in each area progress has been made towards new conceptions of prosody's role in processing, and in particular this has previously held deterministic views of the relationship between prosodic of linguistic structure.

/pdf/prosody-in-the-comprehension-of-spoken-language-a-literature-4hrmky9vrf.pdf

Prosody in the comprehension of spoken language: a literature review.

The automatic conversion of English text to synthetic speech is presently being performed, remarkably well, by a number of laboratory systems and commercial devices. Progress in this area has been made possible by advances in linguistic theory, acoustic-phonetic characterization of English sound patterns, perceptual psychology, mathematical modeling of speech production, structured programming, and computer hardware design. This review traces the early work on the development of speech synthesizers, discovery of minimal acoustic cues for phonetic contrasts, evolution of phonemic rule programs, incorporation of prosodic rules, and formulation of techniques for text analysis. Examples of rules are used liberally to illustrate the state of the art. Many of the examples are taken from Klattalk, a text-to-speech system developed by the author. A number of scientific problems are identified that prevent current systems from achieving the goal of completely human-sounding speech. While the emphasis is on rule programs that drive a format synthesizer, alternatives such as articulatory synthesis and waveform concatenation are also reviewed. An extensive bibliography has been assembled to show both the breadth of synthesis activity and the wealth of phenomena covered by rules in the best of these programs. A recording of selected examples of the historical development of synthetic speech, enclosed as a 33 1/3-rpm record, is described in the Appendix.

Review of text‐to‐speech conversion for English

In this article, we attempt to reconcile the linguistic hypothesis that speech involves an underlying sequencing of abstract, discrete, context-independent units, with the empirical observation of continuous, context-dependent interleaving of articulatory movements. To this end, we first review a previously proposed task-dynamic model for the coordination and control of the speech articulators. We then describe an extension of this model in which invariant speech units (gestural primitives) are identified with context-independent sets of parameters in a dynamical system having two functionally distinct but interacting levels. The intergestural level is defined according to a set of activation coordinates; the interarticulator level is defined according to both model articulator and tractvariable coordinates. In the framework of this extended model, coproduction effects in speech are described in terms of the blending dynamics defined among a set of temporally overlapping active units; the relative timing ...

https://www.haskins.yale.edu/sr/SR099/SR099_03.pdf

A Dynamical Approach to Gestural Patterning in Speech Production

The Evolution of Language

http://techlab.bu.edu/files/resources/articles_tt/Roles%20and%20representations%20of%20systematic%20fine%20phonetic%20detail%20in%20speech%20understanding.pdf

Roles and representations of systematic fine phonetic detail in speech understanding

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the phonological rhythm. Rhythm is a form of structure that plays an organizing role in speech. Despite this all-inclusiveness of potential rhythmic sources in speech, some processes play a more dominant role than others in defining what is commonly felt to be the rhythm of a phrase. Speech communication is a motor–perceptual process, and thus, the rhythmic structures typically found in it are of the sort reasonable for speakers to produce and for listeners to perceive. The organizing rhythm of the spoken utterance can be influenced by virtually any element of speech that is subject to sequential patterning. Although children can be sensitive to some differences in prosodic contour as early as 18 months, their ability to produce consistent differences in stress-accent develops much later. Children become sensitive to the stress patterns of phrases at about the age of 2 years; however, they can begin to signal some accentual distinctions in their own speech soon after. Both their perception and their production of the full system of stress distinctions can remain inaccurate in some respects until the age of 12. Children's early polysyllabic utterances show a high frequency of unreduced syllables.

Chapter 12 – RETRACTED: PHONOLOGICAL RHYTHM: DEFINITION AND DEVELOPMENT

This study describes the frequencies of the first two formants of monophthongs produced by male RP speakers in four age groups: aged 20–25, 35–40, 50–55, and 65–73 years in 2001. The eleven monophthongs were spoken in /hVd/ contexts by five men in each age group. The eleven words, together with nineteen filler words chosen to distract attention from the purpose of the experiment, were randomized four times and read by each speaker in citation form, for a total of 880 items. F1 and F2 frequencies were measured in Hz and ERB-rate. As expected, in younger compared with older speakers, F1 is higher in /e/ and especially /ae/, and F2 is higher in /u:/ and /υ/. Other vowels varied in overall dispersion of F1 or F2, but no other differences between age groups were observed. There is evidence that the oldest age group to show change in a vowel's quality has particularly large differences between individuals, so that, collectively, members of that group span much of the quality range from ‘conservative’ (older groups) to ‘progressive’ (younger groups). Such so-called ‘break groups’ have implications for theoretical explanations of sound change.

Formant frequencies of RP monophthongs in four age groups of speakers

The changes in the male voice in relation to the biological characteristics of puberty were assessed longitudinally in 26 boys. Speaking and singing fundamental frequencies were analysed in relation to the Tanner staging of puberty, saliva testosterone levels, and the Cooksey classification of voice analysis. There were abrupt changes in voice characteristics between Tanner stages G3 and G4 and more gradually from stages C3 to C5 of Cooksey. Although testosterone concentrations were not predictive of the changes, there was a correlation with testis volume. Voice fundamental frequencies were seen to change abruptly in late puberty, in contrast with previous studies. There is a good correlation between the Tanner and Cooksey methods of classification during male puberty.

https://adc.bmj.com/content/archdischild/77/5/445.full.pdf

Changes in the male voice at puberty

For each of five vowels [i e a o u] following [t], a continuum from non-nasal to nasal was synthesized. Nasalization was introduced by inserting a pole-zero pair in the vicinity of the first formant in an all-pole transfer function. The frequencies and spacing of the pole and zero were systematically varied to change the degree of nasalization. The selection of stimulus parameters was determined from acoustic theory and the results of pilot experiments. The stimuli were presented for identification and discrimination to listeners whose language included a non-nasal--nasal vowel opposition (Gujarati, Hindi, and Bengali) and to American listeners. There were no significant differences between language groups in the 50% crossover points of the identification functions. Some vowels were more influenced by range and context effects than were others. The language groups showed some differences in the shape of the discrimination functions for some vowels. On the basis of the results, it is postulated that (1) there is a basic acoustic property of nasality, independent of the vowel, to which the auditory system responds in a distinctive way regardless of language background; and (2) there are one or more additional acoustic properties that may be used to various degrees in different languages to enhance the contrast between a nasal vowel and its non-nasal congener. A proposed candidate for the basic acoustic property is a measure of the degree of prominence of the spectral peak in the vicinity of the first formant. Additional secondary properties include shifts in the center of gravity of the low-frequency spectral prominence, leading to a change in perceived vowel height, and changes in overall spectral balance.

Sarah Hawkins

Papers

Roles and representations of systematic fine phonetic detail in speech understanding

Chapter 12 – RETRACTED: PHONOLOGICAL RHYTHM: DEFINITION AND DEVELOPMENT

Formant frequencies of RP monophthongs in four age groups of speakers

Changes in the male voice at puberty

Acoustic and perceptual correlates of the non-nasal--nasal distinction for vowels.