Title: Effects of talker differences in vowel production on vowel identifiability
Abstract: Normal talkers differ in speech intelligibility, and vowel production characteristics contribute to intelligibility. This study investigated the relation between talker’s acoustic vowel characteristics and the identification of their vowels by normal-hearing listners. Static and dynamic characteristics were measured for ten American English vowels producted in /dVd/ context by two female and two male talkers. Listeners identified four types of resynthesized vowels for each talker, ranging from nearly natural tokens with dynamic formants and appropriate duration values to relatively impoverished tokens containing only static formants and no duration cues. Significant differences in identification scores among talkers were found. The talker with the best-identified vowels, a male, had the largest and most dispersed vowel space with little overlap of formant trajectories in the dynamic F1×F2 space. The worst talker, also male, had a smaller vowel space with greater overlap of formant trajectories. For all four talkers, dynamic-formant vowels were better identified than static-formant vowels, and there were greater differences among talkers for dynamic-formant vowels than for static-formant vowels. The results confirm that formant movement contributes to vowel identification and that greater separation in the dynamic F1×F2 space contributes to better vowel identifiability.
Publication Year: 1999
Publication Date: 1999-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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