Instruments and Methodology
High-fidelity speech recording
Participants' speech is recorded in controlled sound-treated environment using high-fidelity recording devices; to be later digitized, edited, analyzed and/or played to listeners. Instrumentation:
Directional and omnidirectional microphones; DAT recorders/CD recorders. |
Digitization and editing of recorded samples
The recorded sample is converted from analog to digital form in order to allow further processing of the signals. Additionally, the recordings are cleaned up, i.e. removal of unnecessary fillers, repetitions and the recorded chunks are split into unfinished sound files. Instrumentation:
DAT/CD recorders, connected to computers with sound editing programs such as Sound Forge, PRAAT, Cool Edit, Wave, etcInstrumentation: |
Acoustic Analysis
The individual digitized sound files are now analyzed for various acoustic parameters depending on the experiments' rationale (e.g. duration, frequency, amplitude, formant history analysis, LPC analysis, etc.) Instrumentation:
Software programs such as CSL, Multispeech, PRAAT, BLISS, etc. |
Acoustic Manipulation
Depending on the experiments' rationale, the individual digitized sound files could also be manipulated or edited in different ways i.e. smearing, adding noise, splicing segments, changing acoustic parameters of duration, frequency, amplitude, sampling rate, etc. Instrumentation:
Software programs such as CSL, Multispeech, PRAAT, BLISS, etc. |
Speech Perception Tasks
Subjects participate in a variety of listening experiments e.g. perceptual identification and discrimination, rating, lexical-decision, priming, etc. Instrumentation:
Software programs such as SuperLab and BLISS |