Voice

About: Voice is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2393 publications have been published within this topic receiving 56637 citations.

Influence of following context on perception of the voiced-voiceless distinction in syllable-final stop consonants.

Abstract: The duration of the vowel preceding a syllable‐final stop consonant (as defined by some acoustic criterion) generally is a potent cue to the perception of the stop as phonologically voiced or voiceless. We show that the absolute vowel duration that characterizes the voiced—voiceless boundary in a monosyllable is reduced considerably when a second syllable beginning with a different stop consonant is added to form a disyllabic word. We also show that this contextual effect declines with increasing temporal separation between the two syllables, and we examine this decline in relation to listener's judgments of whether they hear the stimulus as one disyllabic word or as two successive monosyllabic words. The effect of syllabic context, apart from introducing closure duration as an additional voicing cue, may reflect listeners' tacit knowledge of the temporal compression that occurs in speech production as the number of syllables in a word is increased. [Research supported by NICHD.]

Laryngeal coarticulation. Section 1: Coarticulatory investigations of the devoicing gesture

Abstract: This paper reviews the current state of our knowledge about the organization of the devoicing gesture in speech. First of all, the influence of place and manner of articulation on the devoicing gesture in single voiceless consonants is discussed. This provides the background for consideration of coarticulatory effects in two main classes of consonantal sequences. The first class involves sequences of voiceless stop (or fricative) plus sonorant (e.g. /pl/). It is well-known that the sonorant can undergo devoicing, induced by the coarticulatory effect of the adjacent voiceless consonant. It is much less clear if and how laryngeal-oral interarticulatory coordination in modified with respect to the pattern found for single voiceless consonants. This could be of great theoretical interest since there are reports that total duration of voicelessness in e.g. /pl/ is longer than in /p/. It would be intriguing if the devoicing gesture, accordingly, were longer in the former case, as it is not clear what current theory of coarticulation could handle this. The second class involves sequences of purely voiceless sounds. Here the view is of coarticulation as coproduction, i.e. what sounds in consonant sequences are associated with a separate laryngeal gesture, and how multiple gesture blend. While a considerable amount is known about the laryngeal movements per se, it is argued (as for the first class of sequences) that the laryngeal findings need to be linked more closely to improved knowledge of the organization of the relevant oral gesture

The perception of syllable affiliation of singleton stops in repetitive speech.

Abstract: Stetson (1951) noted that repeating singleton coda consonants at fast speech rates makes them be perceived as onset consonants affiliated with a following vowel. The current study documents the perception of rate-induced resyllabification, as well as what temporal properties give rise to the perception of syllable affiliation. Stimuli were extracted from a previous study of repeated stop + vowel and vowel + stop syllables (de Jong, 2001a, 2001b). Forced-choice identification tasks show that slow repetitions are clearly distinguished. As speakers increase rate, they reach a point after which listeners disagree as to the affiliation of the stop. This pattern is found for voiced and voiceless consonants using different stimulus extraction techniques. Acoustic models of the identifications indicate that the sudden shift in syllabification occurs with the loss of an acoustic hiatus between successive syllables. Acoustic models of the fast rate identifications indicate various other qualities, such as consonant voicing, affect the probability that the consonants will be perceived as onsets. These results indicate a model of syllabic affiliation where specific juncture-marking aspects of the signal dominate parsing, and in their absence other differences provide additional, weaker cues to syllabic affiliation.

Amplifying Voice in Organizations

Abstract: We extend the field’s understanding of voice recognition by examining peer responses to voice. We investigate how employees can help peers get a status boost from voicing, while also raising their ...

Speech enhancement using voice source models

Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) models have been shown to be effective models of the human vocal tract during voicing. However the most common model of speech for enhancement purposes, AR process excited by white noise, fails to capture the periodic nature of voiced speech. Speech synthesis researchers have long recognized this problem and have developed a variety of sophisticated excitation models, however these models have yet to make an impact in speech enhancement. We have chosen one of the most common excitation models, the four-parameter LF model of Fant, Liljencrants and Lin (1985), and applied it to the enhancement of individual voiced phonemes. Comparing the performance of the conventional white-noise-driven AR, an impulsive-driven AR, and AR based on the LF model shows that the LF model yields a substantial improvement, on the order of 1.3 dB.