Formant Frequency Characteristics in Normal Arabic-Speaking Jordanians

Frequency measurement of vowel formants produced by Brazilian children aged between 4 and 8 years

OBJECTIVE

To investigate frequency measurement of the first three formants of the seven oral Brazilian Portuguese vowels of healthy children aged 4-8 years.

METHODS

Two hundred seven children of both genders were selected by oral expression screening and perceptive-auditory analysis. They were separated into four age groups (G1, G2, G3, and G4) and by gender. The voice signals were obtained from key sentence utterance and segments of the seven Brazilian Portuguese oral vowels in tonic position used to estimate formant frequency measurement. Software Praat was used to for processing the recordings.

RESULTS

Findings were presented by mean values of each of the investigated parameters. A rate of 61.90% of statistically significant differences between genders was found, and when analyzing the age groups and genders, we observed that 65 of the 84 items studied (seven vowels × three formant frequencies × four groups) had higher frequencies of formants for girls. There was a decrease in the frequencies values of the first three formants with age. The results recommended grouping of G1 and G2, and they showed a clear difference between this new formed group and G4. In the age groups of 5-year old to 6 years 11 months (G2 and G3) and 6-year old to 7 years 11 months (G3 and G4), there were statistically significant changes that were random for parameter and vowel. There was a decrease in the frequencies values of the first three formants with age.

CONCLUSION

Formant frequencies showed a tendency to differentiate genders and their absolute values were in general higher in girls. Age increases showed decreases in formant frequencies. Tests for statistical differences led to grouping of G1 and G2 and a clear difference between this new formed group and G4. The comparison between G2 and G3 and G3 and G4 showed random changes. The changes during this age period (5-year old to 7 years 11 months) were attributed to a transition stage of acoustic measurements in children. As formant frequencies vary according to structural and postural aspects of the vocal tract and speech organs, their study in healthy children contributes for the understanding of the development of the pediatric phonation system, in addition to offering a reference data set for future studies of children with vocal disorders that can potentially impact the resonance system.

Gender classification in children based on speech characteristics: using fundamental and formant frequencies of Malay vowels

Speech is one of the prevalent communication mediums for humans. Identifying the gender of a child speaker based on his/her speech is crucial in telecommunication and speech therapy. This article investigates the use of fundamental and formant frequencies from sustained vowel phonation to distinguish the gender of Malay children aged between 7 and 12 years. The Euclidean minimum distance and multilayer perceptron were used to classify the gender of 360 Malay children based on different combinations of fundamental and formant frequencies (F0, F1, F2, and F3). The Euclidean minimum distance with normalized frequency data achieved a classification accuracy of 79.44%, which was higher than that of the nonnormalized frequency data. Age-dependent modeling was used to improve the accuracy of gender classification. The Euclidean distance method obtained 84.17% based on the optimal classification accuracy for all age groups. The accuracy was further increased to 99.81% using multilayer perceptron based on mel-frequency cepstral coefficients.