Spectral characteristics and formant bandwidths of English vowels produced by American males with different speaking styles
Byunggon Yang · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2015
Speaking styles tend to have an influence on spectral characteristics of produced speech. There are not many studies on the spectral characteristics of speech because of complicated processing of too many spectral data. This study examined spectral characteristics and formant bandwidths of English vowels produced by nine American males with different speaking styles: clear or conversational styles; high- or low-pitched voices. PRAAT was used to collect pitch-corrected long-term averaged spectra and bandwidths of the first two formants of 11 vowels in the speaking styles. Results showed that the spectral characteristics of the vowels varied systematically according to the speaking styles. The clear speech showed higher spectral energy of the vowels than that of the conversational speech while the high-pitched voice did the same over the low-pitched voice. Second, there was no statistically significant difference between B1 and B2 in the speaking styles. B1 was generally lower than B2 reflecting the source spectrum and radiation effect. However, there was a statistically significant difference in B2 between the front and back vowel groups. The author concluded that spectral characteristics reflect speaking styles systematically while bandwidths measured at a few formant frequency points do not reveal style differences properly.