7th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing September 16-20, 2002 Denver, Colorado, USA

Effect Of F0 Fluctuation and Amplitude Modulation of Natural Vowels on Vowel Identification in Noisy Environments

Kentaro Ishizuka, Kiyoaki Aikawa

NTT Corporation, Japan

This paper describes findings showing that the fundamental frequency (F0) fluctuation and amplitude modulation (AM) included in natural vowels contribute to improving the vowel identification rate in the presence of interferer sounds. A vowel identification experiment revealed that even very small F0 fluctuations and AM of vowels significantly improved the vowel identification rate in the presence of interferer sound. In addition, it was found that the effect is not the result of reducing the masked threshold. A vowel detection experiment revealed that the effect of reducing the threshold depends on the kinds of interferers, and that the vowel identification rates do not correlate with the masked thresholds.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Ishizuka, Kentaro / Aikawa, Kiyoaki (2002): "Effect of F0 fluctuation and amplitude modulation of natural vowels on vowel identification in noisy environments", In ICSLP-2002, 1633-1636.