Acoustic characteristics of stop consonants in fluent reading Chinese Putonghua speech of adult stutterers

This study investigated whether adults who stutter and normal adult speakers differ in the production of stop consonants in fluent reading Chinese Putonghua speech.Voice onset time（VOT） was measured and the spectral moments at the stop burst were calculated for the stutterers（both before and after the speech therapy） and also for the nonstutterers. The statistical results showed that there were no significant differences in VOT between the nonstutterers and stutterers either prior to or after therapy,although the mean VOT of the stutterers was slightly greater than that of the nonstutterers.The results also indicated that both the obstruction place and the subsequent syllabic final exhibited an influence to a greater extent on VOT for the stutterers.In the spectral domain,the spectral mean of the stuttering participants before therapy was significantly different from that of the normal participants, whereas the group difference became insignificant after the therapy session.The smaller spectral mean for the stutterers might be interpreted as a more posterior occlusion in the oral cavity when producing alveolars and velars.In addition,productions of the stutterers scattered with a wider range in the space of spectral moments.Furthermore,the smaller main effect of syllabic finals on the mean spectral frequency of the burst suggested that the stutterers exhibited weaker anticipatory coarticulation than the nonstutterers.

A comparison on the pitch of statement of dialogue and read speech in Chinese Putonghua

Experimental evidence showed that declination exists in most sentences in Chinese Putonghua. However, the specific pitch variation of prosodic words （PWs） within sentences has not been fully understood. The dialogue material used in this study was taken from the 973 telephone conversation corpus, which includes 69 dialogues, with 79 speakers involved. The read speech material was recordings of news announcement by two announcers from radio, totally 221 sentences. Top and bottom points of pitch contour and the range of prosodic words with the sentences were studied. It was found that, for both dialogue and read speech, pitch declination exists for most sentences, with minor exceptions in the first part of longer sentences for dialogue. Compared to read speech, the pitch range of prosodic words for dialogue is smaller. For dialogue, the pitch range of the last prosodic words of the sentences are relatively larger, while there is no significant difference for pitch ranges of prosodic words in most sentences of read speech. This study will be helpful for the modeling of the pitch range and register of prosodic words in sentences in speech synthesis.