Abstract
This study investigates the Lombard effect triggered at different noise levels in Northern Vietnamese, as measured by formant, vowel space area, and vowel dispersion changes. As Lombard speech is generally found more intelligible than speech produced in quiet, we hypothesize that the vowel space area and between-group vowel dispersion would increase in general, in order to maximize vowel-tone contrasts. Acoustic analyses on speech produced in quiet and two noise levels show that contrary to expectation, the vowel space area decreased significantly with the increase of background noise level, as a consequence of the increase of the first formant for most vowels and the decrease of the second formant for non-back vowels. However, the variability within vowel groups decreased, showing better clustering of the same vowel sounds within the vowel space. These findings present a complex picture of the intelligibility of Lombard speech in a tonal language.
Original language | English (US) |
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Journal | Proceedings of 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) |
Volume | 2023-August |
State | Published - 2023 |
Event | 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) - Prague Congress Center, Prague, Czech Republic Duration: Aug 7 2023 → Aug 11 2023 |