ESCA/NATO Tutorial and Research Workshop on
Speech Under Stress

Lisbon, Portugal
September 14-15, 1995

Effects of Anxiety in Visual and Audio Speech Databases

J. Thompson, J. S. Mason

Speech Research Group, University of Wales, Swansea, UK

A large proportion of current speech related research is founded upon databases collected under controlled conditions. The manner in which they are collected is likely induce variations due to anxiety, and analysis of a typical speech database is presented supporting this. Trends in speaker identification (SI) error rates correlate with postulated trends in anxiety levels along the time course of data collection. Further analysis using estimated glottal waveforms shows a speaker that causes high SI errors to have speech that exhibits characteristics of higher stress at the initial phase of database recording.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Thompson, J. / Mason, J. S. (1995): "Effects of anxiety in visual and audio speech databases", In SUS-1995, 21-24.