An acoustic-perceptual study of the telephone speaking style with implications for speaker verification in Brazilian Portuguese

• Grant number: 15/12174-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: October 01, 2015
• End date: February 28, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Plinio Almeida Barbosa
• Grantee: Renata Regina Passetti
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research aims at studying the telephone speaking style both by analyzing the acoustic parameters, which are modified during the act of speaking through a mobile phone, and by investigating the listeners' discrimination capacity between the telephone speaking style and the non-mediated speaking style. The corpus will consist in spontaneous speech recordings, which will be made in two situations: "face-to-face", with speech samples containing the speakers' non-mediated speaking style, the one corresponding to the interaction without external interference, and "by telephone", with speech samples containing the speakers' telephone style, the one adopted while speaking through a mobile phone - which will be conducted in noisy and silent environments. The use of a telephone speech corpus aims at investigating the modifications in the telephone speaking style when compared to the non-mediated speaking style. Furthermore, this corpus will allow to investigate whether these modifications would be related to environmental variations, as a way to ensure the acoustic message intelligibility to the listener at the opposite line side. The acoustic analysis techniques to be studied will involve the evaluation of the following parameters: articulation rate; fundamental frequency descriptors (mean, median, standard deviation and baseline); silent and filled pauses; spectral emphasis; and loudness. The analysis of the perceptual dimension will correlate the listeners' choices in a perceptual test to the analyzed parameters and will investigate the possible "acoustic cues" that the listeners could be using to support their choices in distinguishing between the two speaking styles. Analyzes will be validated statistically.

Scientific publications

(References retrieved automatically from Web of Science and SciELO through information on FAPESP grants and their corresponding numbers as mentioned in the publications by the authors)

PASSETTI, RENATE REGINA; CONSTANTINI, ANA CAROLINA. The Effect of Telephone Transmission on Voice Quality Perception. JOURNAL OF VOICE, v. 33, n. 5, p. 649-658, SEP 2019. (15/12174-9)

Academic Publications

(References retrieved automatically from State of São Paulo Research Institutions)

PASSETTI, Renata Regina. An acoustic-perceptual study of the telephone speaking style with implications for speaker verification in Brazilian Portuguese. 2018. Doctoral Thesis - Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem Campinas, SP.