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Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics

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POMA - 160th Meeting Acoustical Society of America
Conference Location: Cancun, Mexico Conference Date: 15 - 19 November 2010
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Influence of Classroom Acoustics on the Voice Levels of Teachers With and Without Voice Problems: A Field Study

David Pelegrin-Garcia, Viveka Lyberg-Åhlander, Roland Rydell, Jonas Brunskog, and Anders Lofqvist

POMA Volume 11, pp. 060001 (December 2010); (9 pages)

Online Publication Date: December 15, 2010

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Many teachers suffer from voice problems and classroom acoustics has been considered as one of the potential hazards for this. The present study examines how classroom acoustics interacts with the voices of 14 teachers without voice problems and 13 teachers with voice problems. The assessment of the voice problems was made with a questionnaire and a laryngological examination. During teaching, the sound pressure level at the teacher's position was monitored. The teacher's voice level and the activity noise level were separated using mixed Gaussians. In addition, objective acoustic parameters of Reverberation Time and Voice Support were measured in the 30 empty classrooms of the study. An empirical model shows that the measured voice levels depended on the activity noise levels and the voice support. Teachers with and without voice problems were differently affected by the voice support of the classroom. The results thus suggest that teachers with voice problems are more aware of classroom acoustic conditions than their healthy colleagues and make use of the more supportive rooms to lower their voice levels. This behavior may result from an adaptation process of the teachers with voice problems to preserve their voices. [Work supported by AFA.]
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43.55.Hy Subjective effects in room acoustics, speech in rooms
43.70.Mn Relations between speech production and perception
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Quantification of Context Effects in Phoneme and Word Recognition by Non-Native Listeners

Lu-Feng Shi and Laura L. Koenig

POMA Volume 11, pp. 060002 (January 2011); (16 pages)

Online Publication Date: January 30, 2011

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Non-native listeners have difficulty perceiving context cues in speech. The current study intended to quantify the gain in non-native listeners' perception of English speech due to context by adopting the Boothroyd and Nittrouer model [JASA, 84:101-114, 1988], in which context effects are expressed via factors j and k. These factors are mathematically equal to the total number of components in a speech stimulus with no context, but are reduced when context is present. Ten normal-hearing, non-native and ten native listeners participated in this study. To investigate the effect of acoustic-phonetic cues, 12 lists of CVC English words and 12 lists of nonsense words were employed. To investigate the effect of semantic-syntactic cues, three sets of 20 four-word sentences were employed. These sentences differed in the amount of semantic and syntactic cues contained in the stimuli. All stimuli were presented binaurally at 45 dB HL. A concomitant speech-weighted steady-state noise was added at 39 and 45 dB HL for words and sentences, respectively. Non-native listeners' verbal responses were recorded digitally. It was expected that j and k are larger in value in non-native than native listeners and that the magnitude of the difference is associated with non-native listeners' English learning history.
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43.71.Es Vowel and consonant perception; perception of words, sentences, and fluent speech
43.71.Gv Measures of speech perception (intelligibility and quality)
43.71.Hw Cross-language perception of speech
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Patterns of Tone Sandhi Productivity in Tianjin Chinese

Jie Zhang and Jiang Liu

POMA Volume 11, pp. 060003 (March 2011); (18 pages)

Online Publication Date: March 25, 2011

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Tianjin Chinese has a complex system of tone sandhi. This study provides a detailed acoustic description of tone sandhi patterns in both real lexical items and novel words in Tianjin. The data were collected from 48 speakers of Tianjin, who were instructed to pronounce disyllabic sequences as real words based on voice prompts. The results showed that the productivity of the sandhis in novel words varies depending on the sandhi--some are less productive than in real words and some are more productive than in real words, indicating a combination of underlearning, overlearning, and proper learning of the sandhis from the lexicon. A theoretical model that predicts the productivity patterns based on the phonetic properties of the sandhis and statistical generalizations about the sandhis over the lexicon is also discussed.
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43.70.Fq Acoustical correlates of phonetic segments and suprasegmental properties: stress, timing, and intonation
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The importance of optimal parameter setting for pitch extraction

Evanini Keelan, Catherine Lai, and Klaus Zechner

POMA Volume 11, pp. 060004 (June 2011); (10 pages)

Online Publication Date: June 22, 2011

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In this study we present a performance comparison for five pitch extraction algorithms: Auto Correlation, Cross Correlation, and Sub-Harmonic Summation (as implemented in PRAAT [Boersma and Weenick (2010)]), the Robust Algorithm for Pitch Tracking implemented in ESPS [Talkin (1995)], and SWIPE' [Camacho (2007)]. Recent research showed that SHS and SWIPE' outperformed the other algorithms on two speech databases with EGG reference values [Camacho (2007)]. That study, however, used a fixed search range of 40-800 Hz for all speakers, regardless of sex or speaker-specific pitch characteristics. In the current study, we adopt the parameter optimization strategy from De Looze and Rauzy (2009) to calculate specific pitch floor and ceiling values for each speaker. Our results show a substantial improvement in accuracy of the AC, CC, and RAPT algorithms when the optimized parameters are used (especially for the female speakers), and all five algorithms show similar performance. The gross error rate for all five algorithms ranges from 0.1% to 0.3% (N=18 098) on the FDA database [Bagshaw (1994)] and from 0.2% to 0.4% (N=11 527) on the Keele database [Plante et al. (1995)]. Our study thus highlights the importance of pre-processing the speech signal to determine optimal speaker-specific parameters for pitch extraction.
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43.66.Hg Pitch
43.70.Fq Acoustical correlates of phonetic segments and suprasegmental properties: stress, timing, and intonation
43.70.Jt Instrumentation and methodology for speech production research
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Absence or presence of preceding sound can change perceived phonetic identity

Kathy Carbonell and Andrew J. Lotto

POMA Volume 11, pp. 060005 (December 2012); (9 pages)

Online Publication Date: December 06, 2012

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Participants were asked to categorize a series of syllables varying from /ga/ to /da/ presented in isolation or following /al/, /ar/, /a/, or filtered noise bands. Typical shifts in categorization were obtained for /al/ vs. /ar/ contexts as predicted by compensation for coarticulation, but the shift in response between isolated presentation and any of the context conditions was much larger, even when the context was broadband noise. These results suggest that the effect of the presence of any context sound is greater than the effect of the content of the context sounds.
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43.71.Rt Sensory mechanisms in speech perception
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The relative contribution to speech intelligibility from consonants and vowels using synthesized and naturally-spoken sentences

Jeffrey DiGiovanni, Jessica M. Prewitt, Naveen K. Nagaraj, and Danny R. Moates

POMA Volume 11, pp. 060006 (December 2012); (8 pages)

Online Publication Date: December 06, 2012

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Several studies have attempted to understand why intelligibility is maintained in sentences or words in which all consonants were replaced by silence or noise. Studies have traditionally used naturally spoken stimuli to study these effects. Cole et al. (1996) found that when sentences were presented with only vowels or only consonants intact, participants performed significantly better in the vowel only condition. Others [Kewley‐Port et al. (2007); Fogerty and Kewley‐Port (2009); Lee and Kewley‐Port (2009)] have attempted to assess the source of intelligibility improvements for the vowel-only conditions without conclusive results. Naturally spoken stimuli have multiple imbued cues that are difficult to control and thus present challenges in teasing out the relative contributions of each cue. It has been proposed that synthesized speech may provide a method to assess the specific contribution of the cues included in consonants and vowels to speech intelligibility. The goals of this study were to determine if the intelligibility scores were the same for similarly processed synthesized and naturally produced sentences, and to define the extremes of intelligibility using different synthesis techniques. Participants performed similarly in synthesized and naturally produced speech conditions, supporting the use of synthesized speech in determining the relative contribution of vowel cues.
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43.71.Es Vowel and consonant perception; perception of words, sentences, and fluent speech
43.71.Gv Measures of speech perception (intelligibility and quality)
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Speech articulator movements recorded from facing talkers using two electromagnetic articulometer systems simultaneously

Mark Tiede, Rikke Bundgaard-Nielsen, Christian Kroos, Guillaume Gibert, Virginie Attina, Benjawan Kasisopa, Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson, and Catherine Best

POMA Volume 11, pp. 060007 (November 2012); (9 pages)

Online Publication Date: November 30, 2012

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Two 3D electromagnetic articulometer (EMA) systems, the Carstens AG500 and Northern Digital WAVE, have been used simultaneously without mutual interference to record the speech articulator movements of two talkers facing one another two meters apart. A series of benchmark tests evaluating the stability of fixed distances between sensors attached to a rotating rigid body was first conducted to determine whether the two systems could operate independently, with results showing no significant effect of dual operation on either system. In the experiment proper, two native speakers of American English participated as subjects. Sensors were glued to three points on the tongue, the upper and lower incisors, lips, and left and right mastoid processes for each subject. Independent audio tracks were recorded using separate directional microphones, which were used to align the kinematic data from both subjects during post-processing. Data collected were of two types: extended spontaneous conversation, and repeated incongruent word sequences (e.g., talker one produced "cop top..."; talker two "top cop..."). Both talkers show strong positive correlations between speech rate (in syllables/sec) and head movement. The word sequences also show error and rate effects related to mutual entrainment. [Supported by ARC Human Communication Science Network (RN0460284), MARCS Auditory Laboratories, NIH]
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43.70.Bk Models and theories of speech production
43.70.Jt Instrumentation and methodology for speech production research
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