The Relationship of Vocal Loudness Manipulation to Prosodic F0 and Durational Variables in Healthy Adults

Abstract

This investigation was motivated by observations that when persons with dysarthria increase loudness their speech improves. Some studies have indicated that this improvement may be related to an increase of prosodic variation. Studies have reported an increase of fundamental frequency (F0) variation with increased loudness, but there has been no examination of the relation of loudness manipulation to specific prosodic variables that are known to aid a listener in parsing out meaningful information. This study examined the relation of vocal loudness production to selected acoustic variables known to inform listeners of phrase and sentence boundaries: specifically, F0 declination and final-word lengthening. Ten young, healthy women were audio-recorded while they read aloud a paragraph at what each considered normal loudness, twice-normal loudness, and half-normal loudness. Results showed that there was a statistically significant increase of F0 declination, brought about by a higher resetting of F0 at the beginning of a sentence and an increase of final-word lengthening from the half-normal loudness condition to the twice-normal loudness condition. These results suggest that when some persons with dysarthria increase loudness, variables related to prosody may change, which in turn contributes to improvement in communicative effectiveness. However, until this procedure is tested with individuals who have dysarthria, it is uncertain whether a similar effect would be observed.

Clear Speech Variants: An Acoustic Study in Parkinson's Disease

“…Therefore, it is possible that the instructions to "overenunciate" might direct a speaker's attention to articulation, whereas the instructions to "speak to someone with a hearing impairment" might direct a speaker's attention to the respiratory-phonatory mechanism. It has been proposed that increased effort at the respiratory-phonatory level during loud speech not only increases SPL but also increases mean F0 (Dromey & Ramig, 1998;Ramig et al, 1995;Watson & Hughes, 2006). Given this relationship, it is possible that an increase in SPL and mean F0 can be interpreted as an increase in respiratory-phonatory effort.…”

Automatic recognition of Indonesian declarative questions and statements using polynomial coefficients of the pitch contours

“…Four types of the utterance parts: final word, final syllable, final-two-syllables, and final-but-one-syllable (the syllable before final syllable) are investigated in the experiments. Then, we use the pitch contour information, which is the major correlate of intonation [26][27][28] and apply the polynomial expansion [29][30][31] to extract features from the pitch contour. Finally, a neural network classifier is used to distinguish between DQs and statements in Indonesian speech.…”

What does it take to stress a word? Digital manipulation of stress markers in ataxic dysarthria

“…), and those that manipulate the data digitally (Hammen et al . , Laures and Weismer , Watson and Hughes ). Whilst the former method will have greater face validity by being entirely based on naturally produced speech samples, the latter guarantees that the intended changes were actually performed and allows a higher degree of control over the extent of these changes.…”

“…On the basis of these results, further manipulations were performed and used in a second perceptual experiment to answer research question 2. Two main paradigms to assess the effects of changes to speech production on listeners can be found in the motor speech disorder literature, those that ask speakers to change their performance (e.g., Hammen andYorkston 1996, Tjaden et al 2014), and those that manipulate the data digitally (Hammen et al 1994, Laures and Weismer 1999, Watson and Hughes 2006. Whilst the former method will have greater face validity by being entirely based on naturally produced speech samples, the latter guarantees that the intended changes were actually performed and allows a higher degree of control over the extent of these changes.…”