Consistency and reliability of voice quality ratings for different types of speech fragments.
This study describes a perception experiment in which listeners were asked to rate voice fragments obtained from a variety of speakers on grade, breathiness, and roughness. Four different types of stimuli were presented to each listener. One type of stimulus was based on connected speech fragments; the other three were based on different segments of a sustained vowel, yielding a 200 msec vowel onset stimulus, a 200 msec post-onset stimulus, and a 1000 msec whole vowel stimulus. Analyses focused on the consistency and reliability of grade, roughness, and breathiness ratings. Results indicated that stimulus type had virtually no effect on either within- or between-listener consistency of the grade, breathiness, or roughness ratings. Rating reliability too was hardly influenced by stimulus type. When determined as a function of the overall degree of deviance of a voice, the reliability of breathiness and roughness ratings was slightly higher for whole vowel and vowel onset stimuli than for connected speech and post-onset stimuli. It is concluded that connected speech stimuli are not necessarily to be preferred over vowel-type stimuli for a perceptual evaluation of grade, roughness, or breathiness. The somewhat higher reliability of ratings on vowel onset and whole vowel stimuli as compared to the post-onset stimuli is taken as an indication that the onset part of a vowel may contain voice quality cues that are less salient in the most stable part of a vowel.
de Krom
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Research Institute for Language and Speech, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands.
D003463:Cues; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015588:Observer Variation; D010700:Phonetics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013063:Speech Discrimination Tests / Q000592:standards*; D014832:Voice Disorders / Q000145:classification / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000503:physiopathology; D014833:Voice Quality