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The Effects of Vocoding on Dialect and Gender Perception

Smith, Zane Tanner
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu152210528088199

Abstract Details

2018, Master of Arts, Ohio State University, Speech Language Pathology.
In addition to message-related information, spoken language can provide cues that can describe characteristics related to the speaker that written language simply cannot capture. The way a person speaks can tell us where they are from, their age, their social status, and much more. The literature on regional dialect perception, specifically, has shown that listeners are generally quite accurate when making decisions regarding regional dialects of their same language and gender of a speaker in ideal experimental conditions. However, most speech communication occurs in environments with at least some degree of background noise, whether it be a large crowd or a gentle breeze. In order to modulate speech signals under experimental conditions, researchers have begun using vocoded speech that maintains the gross temporal and amplitude information contained in a waveform, but eliminates the fine spectral information by adding frequency-matched white noise to the signal, rendering the signal to noise ration much higher than is ideal. In this study, listeners were tasked with identifying the sex and dialect of the speakers whose signals were processed through noise vocoding at logarithmically divided frequency bands. In addition, the intelligibility of the processed speech signals was assessed to examine how speech intelligibility is affected by the lack of fine spectral information while retaining the temporal and amplitude information. The stimuli were played to 20 listeners (10 male, 10 female) who identified the dialect and sex of the speakers. Listeners were least sensitive to dialect cues at 4-band vocoding, but increased in accuracy as the number of vocoded bands increased. Still, across all subjects and interactions, the unprocessed speech still provided more dialectal cues than any of the processed conditions. These results confirm the prediction that the ability to identify talker dialect will improve as the number of noise bands increases, despite any interactions of speaker sex.
Robert Fox (Advisor)
Ewa Jacewicz (Advisor)
43 p.
Language; Linguistics; Speech Therapy
Vocoded, Vocoding, Low-pass, Band-pass, dialect, gender, cochlear, linguistics,

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Smith, Z. T. (2018). The Effects of Vocoding on Dialect and Gender Perception [Master's thesis, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu152210528088199

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Smith, Zane. The Effects of Vocoding on Dialect and Gender Perception. 2018. Ohio State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu152210528088199.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Smith, Zane. "The Effects of Vocoding on Dialect and Gender Perception." Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu152210528088199

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu152210528088199
179
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.