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Acoustic And Perceptual Correlates Of Breathy Vocal Quality, Ronald Allen Cleveland

Masters Theses

Recordings were made of seven normal female and eight normal male talkers producing sustained vowels under normal, moderately breathy, and very breathy conditions. Twenty listeners judged the recorded vowel tokens for degree of breathiness using a direct magnitude estimation procedure. A Cronbach coefficient alpha revealed strong intrasubject agreement.

Several acoustic analyses were evaluated by measuring their correlations with the mean of the listeners' breathiness ratings. Measures of cepstral peak prominence in band limited signals were most strongly correlated with perceived breathiness. The height of the autocorrelation peak in highpass filtered signals and the relative amplitude of the first harmonic were …