Analysis and perception of speech under physical task stress
Keith W. Godin, John H. L. Hansen · 2008
It is known that speech under physical task stress degrades speech system performance. Therefore, an analysis of speech under physical task stress is performed across several parame-ters to identify acoustic correlates. Formal listener tests are also performed to determine the relationship between acoustic corre-lates and perception. To verify the statistical significance of all results, student-t statistical tests are applied. It was found that fundamental frequency decreases for many speakers, that ut-terance duration increases for some speakers and decreases for others, and that the glottal waveform is quantifiably different for many speakers. Perturbation of two speech features, funda-mental frequency and the glottal waveform, is applied in listener tests to quantify the degree to which these features convey phys-ical stress content in speech. Finally, the enhanced understand-ing of physical task stress speech provided here is discussed in the context of speech systems. Index Terms: physical task stress, stress analysis 1.