The Relative Amplitude of Vowel Formants

元音共振峰的相对振幅

• 批准号: 6589874
• 负责人: EWA JACEWICZ
• 金额: $ 7.38万
• 依托单位: OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2003
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2003-01-01 至 2005-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6589874
• 关键词: auditory discrimination; auditory feedback; auditory threshold; clinical research; cues; hearing tests; human subject; neural information processing; phonology; psychoacoustics; sound perception; speech; speech recognition

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The long-term objective of this research is to characterize the role of relative intensity of speech segments in the auditory processing of vowels and consonants within larger prosodic domains such as words. The role of intensity in speech processing has not been explored in a systematic way and its exact contribution is unknown. This application focuses on vowels and investigates the relative amplitude of vowel formants as a cue to making phonemic distinctions. Two specific aims are: 1) to examine the acoustic pattern of the relative amplitude of formants in the production of selected coarticulated and isolated vowels; and 2) to examine the auditory effect of manipulation of formant levels on listeners' decision about vowel quality and intelligibility of words. The proposed acoustic study is an extension of an early work on vowel intensity by House & Fairbanks (1953) to formant levels (F1, F2, F3, F4). Its goal is to establish whether and how vowel intensity is distributed over formant levels and whether this distribution varies with consonantal context. The proposed perception study investigates listeners' response to changes in the relative amplitude of formants for isolated vowels and for vowels in word context. Pilot data show that intensity of formants is a cue to vowel categorization. 24 subjects will be used to further test the patterns of formant levels in a larger set of American English vowels. The acoustic and perceptual relevance of these patterns aims to provide basic understanding about the way the vowel cues are integrated in a single percept when temporal and contextual factors reduce time for their processing in natural speech. Since the dynamic range in the intensity of sounds has been shown to have a dramatic effect on hearing aid performance, and since around one half of the Americans over the age of 65 may be candidates for amplification this research has implications for the quality of health care for these individuals.

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究的长期目标是描述语音片段的相对强度在较大韵律域（如单词）中元音和辅音的听觉处理中的作用。强度在语音处理中的作用还没有被系统地研究过，其确切的贡献也是未知的。这个应用程序集中在元音和调查元音共振峰的相对振幅作为一个线索，使音素的区别。两个具体目标是：1）研究共振峰相对振幅的声学模式，在选定的共同发音和孤立元音的生产; 2）研究听觉效果的共振峰水平的操作对听者的决定元音质量和可懂度的话。拟议的声学研究是House &费尔班克斯（1953）对元音强度的早期工作的扩展，以共振峰水平（F1，F2，F3，F4）。其目的是确定元音强度是否以及如何分布在共振峰水平上，以及这种分布是否随辅音上下文而变化。建议的感知研究调查的听众的反应，在共振峰的相对振幅的变化，孤立的元音和元音在词的上下文。实验数据表明共振峰强度是元音分类的一个线索。24名受试者将被用来进一步测试在一个更大的美国英语元音的共振峰水平的模式。这些模式的声学和感知相关性的目的是提供基本的理解的方式，元音线索集成在一个单一的发音时，时间和上下文因素减少他们的处理时间在自然语音。由于声音强度的动态范围已被证明对助听器性能有显着影响，并且由于65岁以上的美国人中约有一半可能是放大的候选人，因此这项研究对这些人的医疗保健质量有影响。