Effects of fundamental frequency and vocal-tract length changes on attention to one of two simultaneous talkers.

By C. Darwin, D. Brungart, B. Simpson. 2003

306 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Three experiments used the Coordinated Response Measure task to examine the roles that differences in F0 and differences in vocal-tract length have on the ability to attend to one of two simultaneous speech signals. The first experiment asked how increases in the natural F0 difference between two sentences (originally spoken by the same talker) affected listeners' ability to attend to one of the sentences. The second experiment used differences in vocal-tract length, and the third used both F0 and vocal-tract length differences. Differences in F0 greater than 2 semitones produced systematic improvements in performance. Differences in vocal-tract length produced systematic improvements in performance when the ratio of lengths was 1.08 or greater, particularly when the shorter vocal tract belonged to the target talker. Neither of these manipulations produced improvements in performance as great as those produced by a different-sex talker. Systematic changes in both F0 and vocal-tract length that simulated an incremental shift in gender produced substantially larger improvements in performance than did differences in F0 or vocal-tract length alone. In general, shifting one of two utterances spoken by a female voice towards a male voice produces a greater improvement in performance than shifting male towards female. The increase in performance varied with the intonation patterns of individual talkers, being smallest for those talkers who showed most variability in their intonation patterns between different utterances.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Signal Processing

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Anne Cutler
2. Martin P. Cooke
3. Jesper Højvang Jensen
4. Cees H. Taal

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. Martin P. Cooke
2. María Luisa García Lecumberri
3. Anne Cutler

In Signal Processing

1. Anne Cutler
2. Martin P. Cooke
3. María Luisa García Lecumberri
4. Jesper Højvang Jensen
5. Cees H. Taal

Citations in the corpus

• Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review (2010, background): “The success or failure of grouping will depend on factors such as the similarity of competing sources in F0 and vocal tract length (Darwin et al., 2003) as well as how well the patches of energy make sense in the ongoing context formed during interpretation of the utterance.”