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There has been a recent increase in speech research utilizing data recorded with participants' personal devices, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and restrictions on face-toface interactions. This raises important questions about whether these recordings are comparable to those made in traditional lab-based settings. Some previous studies have compared the viability of recordings made with personal devices for the clinical evaluation of voice quality. However, these studies rely on simple statistical analyses and do not examine acoustic correlates of voice quality typically examined in the (socio-) phonetic literature (e.g. H1-H2). In this study, we compare recordings from a set of smartphones/laptops and a solid-state recorder to assess the reliability of a range of acoustic correlates of voice quality. The results show significant differences for many acoustic measures of voice quality across devices. Further exploratory analyses demonstrate that these differences are not simple offsets, but rather that their magnitude depends on the value of the measurement of interest. We therefore urge researchers to exercise caution when examining voice quality based on recordings made with participants' devices, particularly when interested in small effect sizes. We also call on the speech research community to investigate these issues more thoroughly. Copyright © 2021 ISCA.

Creakiness is a well-known turn-taking cue and has been observed to systematically accompany phrase and turn ends in several languages. In Estonian, creaky voice is frequently used by all speakers without any obvious evidence for its systematic use as a turn-taking cue. Rather, it signals a lack of prominence and is favored by lengthening and later timing in phrases. In this paper, we analyze the occurrence of creak with respect to properties of the respiratory cycle. We show that creak is more likely to accompany longer exhalations. Furthermore, the results suggest there is little difference in lung volume values regardless of the presence of creak, indicating that creaky voice might be employed to preserve air over the course of longer utterances. We discuss the results in connection to processes of speech planning in spontaneous speech.

This study investigates acoustic and articulatory correlates of South Swedish word accents (Accent 1 vs. 2) — a tonal distinction traditionally associated with F0 timing. The study is motivated by previous findings on (i) the acoustic complexity of tonal prosody and (ii) tonal-articulatory interplay in other languages.Acoustic and articulatory (EMA) data from two controlled experiments are reported (14 speakers in total; pilot EMA recordings with 2 speakers). Apart from the well-established F0 timing pattern, results of Experiment 1 reveal a longer duration of a post-stress consonant in Accent 2 than in Accent 1, a higher degree of creaky voice in Accent 1, as well as a deviant (two-peak) pitch pattern in Accent 2 for one of eight discourse conditions used in the experiment. Experiment 2 reveals an effect of word accent on vowel articulation, as the tongue body gesture target is reached earlier in Accent 2. It also suggests slight but (marginally) significant word-accent effects on word-initial gestural coordination, taking slightly different forms in the two speakers, as well as corresponding differences in word-initial formant patterns. Results are discussed concerning their potential perceptual relevance, as well as with reference to the c-center effect discussed within Articulatory Phonology. (Less)

This paper presents an automatic speech transformation method of non-ideal phonation of speech (irregular or creaky voice). The irregular-to-regular transformation is performed by analyzing and resynthesizing the residual. A recent continuous pitch estimation algorithm is used for interpolating F0 in regions of irregular voice. The linear prediction residual of irregular sections of speech is replaced by overlap-added frames from a codebook of pitch-synchronous residuals. Finally, speech is reconstructed from the residual. A listening experiment showed that by transforming natural speech samples containing irregular voice, the perceived roughness of the transformed speech is decreased.

The aim of the present experiment was to investigate the acoustic phonetic cues that could underlie a post-stress voicing distinction which, when considered on a segmental basis, appears to be neutralised. The data concern the difference in German between minimal pairs such as 'Enten' and 'enden' which in more casual speaking styles appear to show schwa and oral stop deletion and a surface realisation as a neutralised creaky voice nasal. We extracted from the Kiel Corpus all such contrasts that were judged by trained transcribers to have been neutralised in this way. We measured the spectral slope over the first two harmonics and the time at which the spectral slope first changed significantly. Our results show that, contrary to segmentallybased assumptions, /t, d/ were distinguished depending on the onset time of creaky voice relative to the preceding vowel. These data are consistent with a model in which cues to segmental contrasts may be distributed non-segmentally in time.