Detectability of Missing Pitch Periods in Speech
Sheldon B. Michaels · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1963
The ability of listeners to detect missing pitch periods in human speech has been investigated. The detectability data are presented in relation to the following factors: (1) voiced and unvoiced fricative boundaries, (2) voiced and unvoiced stop boundaries, (3) abrupt fundamental frequency changes, and (4) rapid formant changes. The relationships between these factors and detectability are described and results are compared with previous data that used monotone excitation of a fixed POVO-type vowel simulator. This comparison shows that, while the signal in this experiment is complex and information-bearing, listener ability to detect missing pitch periods is not decreased with respect to monotone-excited fixed-vowel detectability.