The effect of formant trajectories and phoneme durations on vowel intelligibility

Authors:
Akiko Amano-Kusumoto;John-Paul Hosom
Affiliations:
Center for Spoken Language Understanding, Department of Science&Engineering, Oregon Health&Science University, 20000 NW Walker Road, Beaverton, OR USA;Center for Spoken Language Understanding, Department of Science&Engineering, Oregon Health&Science University, Beaverton, OR 97006, USA
Venue:
ICASSP '09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing
Year:
2009

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Abstract

We examined how much listeners can benefit from listening to “clear” (CLR) speech compared to “conversational” (CNV) speech, both spoken at different speaking rates. Vowel intelligibilities of four front vowels (/i:/, /I/, /E/, and /ei/) in background noise were measured with four speaking styles (CNV/SLOW, CNV, CLR, and CLR/FAST). Results showed only tense vowels of CLR speech had a significant difference between CNV and CLR speaking styles, after energy and F0 contour were normalized. We synthesized hybrid (HYB) speech whose formant features were equal to those of CLR speech, while all other features were taken from CNV speech. Primary conclusions from this study are (1) naturally-spoken fast CLR speech was not as intelligible as CLR speech, (2) enhancing formant frequencies to resemble those of CLR speech was effective at improving vowel intelligibility, and (3) spectral tilt and formant bandwidths were not contributing factors to the CLR speech benefit.