A Difference Limen for Vowel Formant Frequency

1955 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 613-617 ◽  
Author(s):  
James L. Flanagan
Keyword(s):  
Difference Limen ◽  
Formant Frequency ◽  
Vowel Formant

The Effects of Changes in Hearing Status in Cochlear Implant Users on the Acoustic Vowel Space and CV Coarticulation

2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 552-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harlan Lane ◽  
Melanie Matthies ◽  
Joseph Perkell ◽  
Jennell Vick ◽  
Majid Zandipour
Keyword(s):  
Vowel Duration ◽  
Formant Frequency ◽  
Direct Role ◽  
Hearing Status ◽  
Vowel Formant ◽  
Vowel Space ◽  
English Vowels ◽  
Deaf Adults ◽  
Second Formant

In order to examine the role of hearing status in controlling coarticulation, eight English vowels in /bVt/ and /dVt/ syllables, embedded in a carrier phrase, were elicited from 7 postlingually deafened adults and 2 speakers with normal hearing. The deaf adults served in repeated recording sessions both before and up to a year after they received cochlear implants and their speech processors were turned on. Each of the two hearing control speakers served in two recording sessions, separated by about 3 months. Measures were made of second formant frequency at obstruent release and at 25 ms intervals until the final obstruent. An index of coarticulation, based on the ratio of F2 at vowel onset to F2 at midvowel target, was computed. Changes in the amount of coarticulation after the change in hearing status were small and nonsystematic for the /bVt/ syllables; those for the /dVt/ syllables averaged a 3% increase—within the range of reliability measures for the 2 hearing control speakers. Locus equations (F2 at vowel onset vs. F2 at vowel midpoint) and ratios of F2 onsets in point vowels were also calculated. Like the index of coarticulation, these measures tended to confirm that hearing status had little if any effect on coarticulation in the deaf speakers, consistent with the hypothesis that hearing does not play a direct role in regulating anticipatory coarticulation in adulthood. With the restoration of some hearing, 2 implant users significantly increased the average spacing between vowels in the formant plane, whereas the remaining 5 decreased that measure. All speakers but one also reduced vowel duration significantly. Four of the speakers reduced dispersion of vowel formant values around vowel midpoint means, but the other 3 did not show this effect.

scholarly journals A comparison of three speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithms for sociophonetics

2009 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 413-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne H. Fabricius ◽  
Dominic Watt ◽  
Daniel Ezra Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Research Tool ◽  
Test Cases ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Formant Frequency ◽  
Vowel Formant ◽  
Normalization Methods ◽  
Vowel Space ◽  
Received Pronunciation ◽  
Existing Data ◽  
Better Than

AbstractThis article evaluates a speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithm initially proposed in Watt & Fabricius (2002). We compare how well this routine, known as the S-centroid procedure, performs as a sociophonetic research tool in three ways: reducing variance in area ratios of vowel spaces (by attempting to equalize vowel space areas); improving overlap of vowel polygons; and reproducing relative positions of vowel means within the vowel space, compared with formant data in raw Hertz. The study uses existing data sets of vowel formant data from two varieties of English, Received Pronunciation and Aberdeen English (northeast Scotland). We conclude that, for the data examined here, the S-centroid W&F procedure performs at least as well as the two speaker-intrinsic, vowel-extrinsic, formant-intrinsic normalization methods rated as best performing by Adank (2003): Lobanov's (1971) z-score procedure and Nearey's (1978) individual log-mean procedure (CLIHi4 in Adank [2003], CLIHi2 as tested here), and in some test cases better than the latter.

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