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Various units of speech have been used as a basis for measurement. The traditional measure of speed in typing and Morse code transmission has been words per minute (wpm). However, in the study of speech the word is not well defined (being primarily a unit of grammar), and speech is not usually temporally stable over a period as long as a minute ...
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. [1] All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously ...
For the specific case of speech, time stretching can be performed using PSOLA. Time-compressed speech is the representation of verbal text in compressed time. While one might expect speeding up to reduce comprehension, Herb Friedman says that "Experiments have shown that the brain works most efficiently if the information rate through the ears ...
Halliday saw the functions of intonation as depending on choices in three main variables: Tonality (division of speech into intonation units), Tonicity (the placement of the tonic syllable or nucleus) and Tone (choice of nuclear tone); [12] these terms (sometimes referred to as "the three T's") have been used more recently. [10]
Prosodic units do not generally correspond to syntactic units, such as phrases and clauses; it is thought that they reflect different aspects of how the brain processes speech, with prosodic units being generated through on-line [definition needed] interaction and processing, and with morphosyntactic units being more automated.
Many tone languages have contour tones, which move from one level to another. For example, Mandarin Chinese has four lexical tones. The high tone is level, without contour; the falling tone is a contour from high pitch to low; the rising tone a contour from mid pitch to high, and, when spoken in isolation, the low tone takes on a dipping ...
In speech communication, intelligibility is a measure of how comprehensible speech is in given conditions. Intelligibility is affected by the level (loud but not too loud) and quality of the speech signal, the type and level of background noise, reverberation (some reflections but not too many), and, for speech over communication devices, the properties of the communication system.
The fundamental frequency of speech can vary from 40 Hz for low-pitched voices to 600 Hz for high-pitched voices. [12] Autocorrelation methods need at least two pitch periods to detect pitch. This means that in order to detect a fundamental frequency of 40 Hz, at least 50 milliseconds (ms) of the speech signal must be analyzed.