Displaying publications 1 - 20 of 34 in total

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  1. Vocal fundamental frequency and perturbation measurements of vowels by normal Malaysian Chinese adults
    Ting HN, Chia SY, Kim KS, Sim SL, Abdul Hamid B
    J Voice, 2011 Nov;25(6):e311-7.
    PMID: 21376529 DOI: 10.1016/j.jvoice.2010.05.004
    The acoustic properties of vowel phonation vary across cultures. These specific characteristics, including vowel fundamental frequency (F(0)) and perturbation measures (Absolute Jitter [Jita], Jitter [Jitt], Relative Average Perturbation [RAP], five-point Period Perturbation Quotient [PPQ5], Absolute Shimmer [ShdB], Shimmer [Shim], and 11-point Amplitude Perturbation Quotient [APQ11]) are not well established for Malaysian Chinese adults. This article investigates the F(0) and perturbation measurements of sustained vowels in 60 normal Malaysian Chinese adults using acoustical analysis. Malaysian Chinese females had significantly higher F(0) than Malaysian males in all six vowels. However, there were no significant differences in F(0) across the vowels for each gender. Significant differences between vowels were observed for Jita, Jitt, PPQ5, ShdB, Shim, and APQ11 among Chinese males, whereas significant differences between vowels were observed for all the perturbation parameters among Chinese females. Chinese males had significantly higher Jita and APQ11 in the vowels than Chinese females, whereas no significant differences were observed between males and females for Jitt, RAP, PPQ5, and Shim. Cross-ethnic comparisons indicate that F(0) of vowel phonation varies within the Chinese ethnic group and across other ethnic groups. The perturbation measures cannot be simply compared, where the measures may vary significantly across different speech analysis softwares.
    Matched MeSH terms: Phonetics*
  2. Fulltext The role of f0 shape and phrasal position in Papuan Malay and American English word identification
    Kaland C, Gordon MK
    Phonetica, 2022 Jun 27;79(3):219-245.
    PMID: 35981718 DOI: 10.1515/phon-2022-2022
    The prosodic structure of under-researched languages in the Trade Malay language family is poorly understood. Although boundary marking has been uncontroversially shown as the major prosodic function in these languages, studies on the use of pitch accents to highlight important words in a phrase remain inconclusive. In addition, most knowledge of pitch accents is based on well-researched languages such as the ones from the Western-Germanic language family. This paper reports two word identification experiments comparing Papuan Malay with the pitch accent language American English, in order to investigate the extent to which the demarcating and highlighting function of prosody can be disentangled. To this end, target words were presented to native listeners of both languages and differed with respect to their position in the phrase (medial or final) and the shape of their f0 movement (original or manipulated). Reaction times for the target word identifications revealed overall faster responses for original and final words compared to manipulated and medial ones. The results add to previous findings on the facilitating effect of pitch accents and further improve our prosodic knowledge of underresearched languages.
    Matched MeSH terms: Phonetics
  3. The effect of dialect on the phonological analysis of Chinese-influenced Malaysian English speaking children
    Phoon HS, Abdullah AC, Maclagan M
    Int J Speech Lang Pathol, 2012 Dec;14(6):487-98.
    PMID: 23039125 DOI: 10.3109/17549507.2012.719549
    This study investigates the effect of dialect on phonological analyses in Chinese-influenced Malaysian English (ChME) speaking children. A total of 264 typically-developing ChME speaking children aged 3-7 years participated in this cross-sectional study. A single word naming task consisting of 195 words was used to elicit speech from the children. The samples obtained were transcribed phonetically and analysed descriptively and statistically. Phonological analyses were completed for speech sound accuracy, age of consonant acquisition, percentage of phonological process occurrence, and age of suppression for phonological processes. All these measurements differed based on whether or not ChME dialectal features were considered correct, with children gaining higher scores when ChME dialect features were considered correct. The findings of the present study provide guidelines for Malaysian speech-language pathologists and stress the need to appropriately consider ChME dialectal features in the phonological analysis of ChME speaking children. They also highlight the issues in accurate differential diagnosis of speech impairment for speech-language pathologists working with children from any linguistically diverse background.
    Matched MeSH terms: Phonetics*
  4. The development of tone discrimination in infancy: Evidence from a cross-linguistic, multi-lab report
    Kalashnikova M, Singh L, Tsui A, Altuntas E, Burnham D, Cannistraci R, et al.
    Dev Sci, 2024 May;27(3):e13459.
    PMID: 37987377 DOI: 10.1111/desc.13459
    We report the findings of a multi-language and multi-lab investigation of young infants' ability to discriminate lexical tones as a function of their native language, age and language experience, as well as of tone properties. Given the high prevalence of lexical tones across human languages, understanding lexical tone acquisition is fundamental for comprehensive theories of language learning. While there are some similarities between the developmental course of lexical tone perception and that of vowels and consonants, findings for lexical tones tend to vary greatly across different laboratories. To reconcile these differences and to assess the developmental trajectory of native and non-native perception of tone contrasts, this study employed a single experimental paradigm with the same two pairs of Cantonese tone contrasts (perceptually similar vs. distinct) across 13 laboratories in Asia-Pacific, Europe and North-America testing 5-, 10- and 17-month-old monolingual (tone, pitch-accent, non-tone) and bilingual (tone/non-tone, non-tone/non-tone) infants. Across the age range and language backgrounds, infants who were not exposed to Cantonese showed robust discrimination of the two non-native lexical tone contrasts. Contrary to this overall finding, the statistical model assessing native discrimination by Cantonese-learning infants failed to yield significant effects. These findings indicate that lexical tone sensitivity is maintained from 5 to 17 months in infants acquiring tone and non-tone languages, challenging the generalisability of the existing theoretical accounts of perceptual narrowing in the first months of life. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: This is a multi-language and multi-lab investigation of young infants' ability to discriminate lexical tones. This study included data from 13 laboratories testing 5-, 10-, and 17-month-old monolingual (tone, pitch-accent, non-tone) and bilingual (tone/non-tone, non-tone/non-tone) infants. Overall, infants discriminated a perceptually similar and a distinct non-native tone contrast, although there was no evidence of a native tone-language advantage in discrimination. These results demonstrate maintenance of tone discrimination throughout development.
    Matched MeSH terms: Phonetics
  5. Fulltext The development of Malay speech audiometry
    Mukari SZ, Said H
    Med J Malaysia, 1991 Sep;46(3):262-8.
    PMID: 1839923
    Speech audiometry is a method for assessing the ability of the auditory system using speech sounds as stimuli. A list of phonemically balanced bisyllabic consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (c-v-c-v) Malay words was produced. All the bisyllabic words (c-v-c-v) thought to be commonly used in everyday conversations were listed from the Dewan Bahasa dictionary and their suitability assessed. The chosen words were divided into 25 groups containing 10 words each. The list was then recorded by a professional male newscaster in a sound proof studio. A normal speech audiometry curve was obtained by testing 60 normal hearing subjects using the prerecorded speech material. The result of the study showed that the normal Malay speech audiometry curve was comparable to those of English and Arabic speech audiometry, in which it was sigmoidal with the optimum discrimination score of 40 dB and half peak level of 17.5 dB.
    Matched MeSH terms: Phonetics
  6. Speech stimuli and nasalance scores for the assessment of resonance in in Mandarin speaking Malaysian children
    Mohd Ibrahim H, Lim HW, Ahmad Rusli Y, Lim CT
    Clin Linguist Phon, 2020 06 02;34(6):554-565.
    PMID: 31537131 DOI: 10.1080/02699206.2019.1668480
    This study was designed to develop language-specific stimuli for the assessment of resonance and to obtain nasalance scores using the newly developed speech stimuli in Mandarin. Gender and age influences on nasalance scores for each of the stimulus were also examined. Participants recruited were typically developing Mandarin-speaking ethnic Chinese children aged 6;00-7;11 growing up in Malaysia. Perceptual ratings of nasality were made based on the GOS.SP.ASS.'98 (revised) for children while nasalance scores were recorded for each stimulus using the Nasometer II (Model 6400). Fifty Mandarin-speaking children (24 males and 26 females) were recruited. None of the participants were perceived with abnormal nasality on the three stimuli. The mean nasalance scores for the Mandarin stimuli were 16.08% (SD = 2.57, 95% CI = 15.35-16.81) for the Oral passage, 25.20% (SD = 3.63, 95% CI = 24.17-26.23) for the Oral-Nasal passage and 55.44% (SD = 4.17, 95% CI = 54.25-56.63) for the Nasal passage. No significant age- and gender-related differences were observed for all the three stimuli. This is the first set of Mandarin stimuli and nasalance norms for Mandarin-speaking children in Malaysia. The influence of phonetic content on nasalance is supported. Findings call for language-specific normative nasalance data and careful selection of stimuli for the assessment of resonance.
    Matched MeSH terms: Phonetics*
  7. Fulltext Severity-based adaptation with limited data for ASR to aid dysarthric speakers
    Mustafa MB, Salim SS, Mohamed N, Al-Qatab B, Siong CE
    PLoS One, 2014;9(1):e86285.
    PMID: 24466004 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0086285
    Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is currently used in many assistive technologies, such as helping individuals with speech impairment in their communication ability. One challenge in ASR for speech-impaired individuals is the difficulty in obtaining a good speech database of impaired speakers for building an effective speech acoustic model. Because there are very few existing databases of impaired speech, which are also limited in size, the obvious solution to build a speech acoustic model of impaired speech is by employing adaptation techniques. However, issues that have not been addressed in existing studies in the area of adaptation for speech impairment are as follows: (1) identifying the most effective adaptation technique for impaired speech; and (2) the use of suitable source models to build an effective impaired-speech acoustic model. This research investigates the above-mentioned two issues on dysarthria, a type of speech impairment affecting millions of people. We applied both unimpaired and impaired speech as the source model with well-known adaptation techniques like the maximum likelihood linear regression (MLLR) and the constrained-MLLR(C-MLLR). The recognition accuracy of each impaired speech acoustic model is measured in terms of word error rate (WER), with further assessments, including phoneme insertion, substitution and deletion rates. Unimpaired speech when combined with limited high-quality speech-impaired data improves performance of ASR systems in recognising severely impaired dysarthric speech. The C-MLLR adaptation technique was also found to be better than MLLR in recognising mildly and moderately impaired speech based on the statistical analysis of the WER. It was found that phoneme substitution was the biggest contributing factor in WER in dysarthric speech for all levels of severity. The results show that the speech acoustic models derived from suitable adaptation techniques improve the performance of ASR systems in recognising impaired speech with limited adaptation data.
    Matched MeSH terms: Phonetics
  8. Rate of multilingual phonological acquisition: Evidence from a cross-sectional study of English-Mandarin-Malay
    Lim HW, Wells B, Howard S
    Clin Linguist Phon, 2015;29(11):793-811.
    PMID: 26237032
    Early child multilingual acquisition is under-explored. Using a cross-sectional study approach, the present research investigates the rate of multilingual phonological acquisition of English-Mandarin-Malay by 64 ethnic Chinese children aged 2;06-4;05 in Malaysia--a multiracial-multilingual country of Asia. The aims of the study are to provide clinical norms for speech development in the multilingual children and to compare multilingual acquisition with monolingual and bilingual acquisition. An innovative multilingual phonological test which adopts well-defined scoring criteria drawing upon local accents of English, Mandarin and Malay is proposed and described in this article. This procedure has been neglected in the few existing Chinese bilingual phonological acquisition studies resulting in peculiar findings. The multilingual children show comparable phonological acquisition milestones to that of monolingual and bilingual peers acquiring the same languages. The implications of the present results are discussed. The present findings contribute to the development of models and theories of child multilingual acquisition.
    Matched MeSH terms: Phonetics*
  9. Fulltext Phonological acquisition among Malaysian English child speakers of Indian descent
    Joseph, Pamela Thomas
    Jurnal Sains Kesihatan Malaysia, 2006;4(2):13-26.
    MyJurnal
    This preliminary study aims to provide an initial description of phonological acquisition among Malaysian Children of Indian descent aged two to six years. The description of the consonantal phonemic inventory as well as various Phonological processes evidenced by subjects is also reported. The mothers’ phonemic inventory was obtained as the representation of the children’s most active environmental linguistic input. Speech samples of the mothers as well as the subjects were obtained from a single word test and narrative test. The speech sample was recorded and transcribed using the International Phonetic Alphabet. The results of the tests revealed a significant correspondence between the subjects' phonemic inventory and their mothers’ except for the following phonemes: /ð/ , /θ/ , /v/ and /w/. Both mothers and subjects demonstrated free variation for the production of /v/ and /w/. The mothers displayed a range of 21-23 phonemes in their inventories whereas the subjects displayed a range of 17-21 phonemes. The age acquisition for some phonemes, namely the affricates which was evidenced by subject aged 2;4 were noted to be earlier than that of subjects in past studies. Rapid phonological development was evidenced at the age of 2;4- 3;7.
    Matched MeSH terms: Phonetics
  10. Perceptual processing of Mandarin nasals by L1 and L2 Mandarin speakers
    Lai YH
    J Psycholinguist Res, 2012 Aug;41(4):237-52.
    PMID: 22089521 DOI: 10.1007/s10936-011-9190-2
    Nasals are cross-linguistically susceptible to change, especially in the syllable final position. Acoustic reports on Mandarin nasal production have recently shown that the syllable-final distinction is frequently dropped. Few studies, however, have addressed the issue of perceptual processing in Mandarin nasals for L1 and L2 speakers of Mandarin Chinese. The current paper addressed to what extent and in what directions L1 and L2 speakers of Mandarin differed in perceiving Mandarin nasals. Possible variables, including the linguistic backgrounds (i.e. L1 vs. L2 speakers of Mandarin Chinese), the vocalic contexts (i.e. [i, ə, a, y, ua, uə, ia]) and the phonetic settings (i.e. syllable-initial vs. syllable-final), were discussed. Asymmetrical findings in the current investigation indicated limitations of speech learning theories developed from European languages in the context of Mandarin nasals. A tri-dimensional model was thus suggested for interpreting the cognitive mechanism in Mandarin nasal perception.
    Matched MeSH terms: Phonetics*
  11. Patterns of recognition of Arabic consonants by non-native children with cochlear implants and normal hearing
    Anis FN, Umat C, Ahmad K, Hamid BA
    Cochlear Implants Int, 2019 01;20(1):12-22.
    PMID: 30293522 DOI: 10.1080/14670100.2018.1530420
    OBJECTIVE: This study examined the patterns of recognition of Arabic consonants, via information transmission analysis for phonological features, in a group of Malay children with normal hearing (NH) and cochlear implants (CI).

    METHOD: A total of 336 and 616 acoustic tokens were collected from six CI and 11 NH Malay children, respectively. The groups were matched for hearing age and duration of exposure to Arabic sounds. All the 28 Arabic consonants in the form of consonant-vowel /a/ were presented randomly twice via a loudspeaker at approximately 65 dB SPL. The participants were asked to repeat verbally the stimulus heard in each presentation.

    RESULTS: Within the native Malay perceptual space, the two groups responded differently to the Arabic consonants. The dispersed uncategorized assimilation in the CI group was distinct in the confusion matrix (CM), as compared to the NH children. Consonants /ħ/, /tˁ/, /sˁ/ and /ʁ/ were difficult for the CI children, while the most accurate item was /k/ (84%). The CI group transmitted significantly reduced information, especially for place feature transmission, then the NH group (p 

    Matched MeSH terms: Phonetics
  12. Fulltext Particle swarm optimization based feature enhancement and feature selection for improved emotion recognition in speech and glottal signals
    Muthusamy H, Polat K, Yaacob S
    PLoS One, 2015;10(3):e0120344.
    PMID: 25799141 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0120344
    In the recent years, many research works have been published using speech related features for speech emotion recognition, however, recent studies show that there is a strong correlation between emotional states and glottal features. In this work, Mel-frequency cepstralcoefficients (MFCCs), linear predictive cepstral coefficients (LPCCs), perceptual linear predictive (PLP) features, gammatone filter outputs, timbral texture features, stationary wavelet transform based timbral texture features and relative wavelet packet energy and entropy features were extracted from the emotional speech (ES) signals and its glottal waveforms(GW). Particle swarm optimization based clustering (PSOC) and wrapper based particle swarm optimization (WPSO) were proposed to enhance the discerning ability of the features and to select the discriminating features respectively. Three different emotional speech databases were utilized to gauge the proposed method. Extreme learning machine (ELM) was employed to classify the different types of emotions. Different experiments were conducted and the results show that the proposed method significantly improves the speech emotion recognition performance compared to previous works published in the literature.
    Matched MeSH terms: Phonetics*
  13. Orthography-phonology consistency in English: Theory- and data-driven measures and their impact on auditory vs. visual word recognition
    Lim A, O'Brien B, Onnis L
    Behav Res Methods, 2024 Mar;56(3):1283-1313.
    PMID: 37553536 DOI: 10.3758/s13428-023-02094-5
    Research on orthographic consistency in English words has selectively identified different sub-syllabic units in isolation (grapheme, onset, vowel, coda, rime), yet there is no comprehensive assessment of how these measures affect word identification when taken together. To study which aspects of consistency are more psychologically relevant, we investigated their independent and composite effects on human reading behavior using large-scale databases. Study 1 found effects on adults' naming responses of both feedforward consistency (orthography to phonology) and feedback consistency (phonology to orthography). Study 2 found feedback but no feedforward consistency effects on visual and auditory lexical decision tasks, with the best predictor being a composite measure of consistency across grapheme, rime, OVC, and word-initial letter-phoneme. In Study 3, we explicitly modeled the reading process with forward and backward flow in a bidirectionally connected neural network. The model captured latent dimensions of quasi-regular mapping that explain additional variance in human reading and spelling behavior, compared to the established measures. Together, the results suggest interactive activation between phonological and orthographic word representations. They also validate the role of computational analyses of language to better understand how print maps to sound, and what properties of natural language affect reading complexity.
    Matched MeSH terms: Phonetics*
  14. Normative nasalance scores for the Malay language
    Ibrahim HM, Reilly S, Kilpatrick N
    Cleft Palate Craniofac J, 2012 Sep;49(5):e61-3.
    PMID: 21787239 DOI: 10.1597/11-001
    To establish normative nasalance scores for a set of newly developed stimuli in Malay.
    Matched MeSH terms: Phonetics*
  15. Multilingual English-Mandarin-Malay phonological error patterns: An initial cross-sectional study of 2 to 4 years old Malaysian Chinese children
    Lim HW
    Clin Linguist Phon, 2018;32(10):889-912.
    PMID: 29993293 DOI: 10.1080/02699206.2018.1459852
    Child multilingual phonological errors are under-explored. Cross-linguistic studies suggest monolingual children make phonological errors that are subject to effects of language universality and ambient language characteristics. Bilingual Chinese children were observed to use not only typical, but also atypical phonological errors compared to monolingual peers acquiring similar languages. Atypical errors are a result of specific bilingual pair effects. Close-language-relatedness (Cantonese-Mandarin) is claimed to be responsible for the nonexistence of atypical errors in both languages, whilst distant-language-relatedness (Cantonese-English) is observed to cause atypical errors in both languages. The present novel cross-sectional study investigated phonological acquisition in three typologically distant languages: English-Mandarin-Malay by 64 multilingual Chinese children aged 2½-4½. The present research aimed to explore if multilingual Chinese children exhibit phonological errors which commensurate to that of monolingual and bilingual Chinese children acquiring similar languages as described in the literature. The single-word phonological test results revealed that the multilinguals exhibited typical and atypical phonological patterns which largely commensurate with the monolinguals and bilinguals. Similar to bilingual children, the multilingual children showed more atypical errors in English than in Mandarin, demonstrating effects of individual language irrespective of potential interaction with additional languages. The present result did not fully support the link between closeness in typology of languages and the absence of atypical errors. Rare atypical errors were found in Mandarin and Malay, two typologically different languages, and both were also interacting with English, another typologically different language. The present findings provided useful preliminary multilingual speech norms for the use of speech therapists.
    Matched MeSH terms: Phonetics*
  16. Fulltext Listening while reading promotes word learning from stories
    Valentini A, Ricketts J, Pye RE, Houston-Price C
    J Exp Child Psychol, 2018 03;167:10-31.
    PMID: 29154028 DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2017.09.022
    Reading and listening to stories fosters vocabulary development. Studies of single word learning suggest that new words are more likely to be learned when both their oral and written forms are provided, compared with when only one form is given. This study explored children's learning of phonological, orthographic, and semantic information about words encountered in a story context. A total of 71 children (8- and 9-year-olds) were exposed to a story containing novel words in one of three conditions: (a) listening, (b) reading, or (c) simultaneous listening and reading ("combined" condition). Half of the novel words were presented with a definition, and half were presented without a definition. Both phonological and orthographic learning were assessed through recognition tasks. Semantic learning was measured using three tasks assessing recognition of each word's category, subcategory, and definition. Phonological learning was observed in all conditions, showing that phonological recoding supported the acquisition of phonological forms when children were not exposed to phonology (the reading condition). In contrast, children showed orthographic learning of the novel words only when they were exposed to orthographic forms, indicating that exposure to phonological forms alone did not prompt the establishment of orthographic representations. Semantic learning was greater in the combined condition than in the listening and reading conditions. The presence of the definition was associated with better performance on the semantic subcategory and definition posttests but not on the phonological, orthographic, or category posttests. Findings are discussed in relation to the lexical quality hypothesis and the availability of attentional resources.
    Matched MeSH terms: Phonetics
  17. Lexical analyses of the function and phonology of Papuan Malay word stress
    Kaland C, Kluge A, van Heuven VJ
    Phonetica, 2021 04 27;78(2):141-168.
    PMID: 33892529 DOI: 10.1515/phon-2021-2003
    The existence of word stress in Indonesian languages has been controversial. Recent acoustic analyses of Papuan Malay suggest that this language has word stress, counter to other studies and unlike closely related languages. The current study further investigates Papuan Malay by means of lexical (non-acoustic) analyses of two different aspects of word stress. In particular, this paper reports two distribution analyses of a word corpus, 1) investigating the extent to which stress patterns may help word recognition and 2) exploring the phonological factors that predict the distribution of stress patterns. The facilitating role of stress patterns in word recognition was investigated in a lexical analysis of word embeddings. The results show that Papuan Malay word stress (potentially) helps to disambiguate words. As for stress predictors, a random forest analysis investigated the effect of multiple morpho-phonological factors on stress placement. It was found that the mid vowels /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ play a central role in stress placement, refining the conclusions of previous work that mainly focused on /ɛ/. The current study confirms that non-acoustic research on stress can complement acoustic research in important ways. Crucially, the combined findings on stress in Papuan Malay so far give rise to an integrated perspective to word stress, in which phonetic, phonological and cognitive factors are considered.
    Matched MeSH terms: Phonetics*
  18. Fulltext High variability phonetic training in adaptive adverse conditions is rapid, effective, and sustained
    Leong CXR, Price JM, Pitchford NJ, van Heuven WJB
    PLoS One, 2018;13(10):e0204888.
    PMID: 30300372 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0204888
    This paper evaluates a novel high variability phonetic training paradigm that involves presenting spoken words in adverse conditions. The effectiveness, generalizability, and longevity of this high variability phonetic training in adverse conditions was evaluated using English phoneme contrasts in three experiments with Malaysian multilinguals. Adverse conditions were created by presenting spoken words against background multi-talker babble. In Experiment 1, the adverse condition level was set at a fixed level throughout the training and in Experiment 2 the adverse condition level was determined for each participant before training using an adaptive staircase procedure. To explore the effectiveness and sustainability of the training, phonemic discrimination ability was assessed before and immediately after training (Experiments 1 and 2) and 6 months after training (Experiment 3). Generalization of training was evaluated within and across phonemic contrasts using trained and untrained stimuli. Results revealed significant perceptual improvements after just three 20-minute training sessions and these improvements were maintained after 6 months. The training benefits also generalized from trained to untrained stimuli. Crucially, perceptual improvements were significantly larger when the adverse conditions were adapted before each training session than when it was set at a fixed level. As the training improvements observed here are markedly larger than those reported in the literature, this indicates that the individualized phonetic training regime in adaptive adverse conditions (HVPT-AAC) is highly effective at improving speech perception.
    Matched MeSH terms: Phonetics
  19. Gender classification in children based on speech characteristics: using fundamental and formant frequencies of Malay vowels
    Zourmand A, Ting HN, Mirhassani SM
    J Voice, 2013 Mar;27(2):201-9.
    PMID: 23473455 DOI: 10.1016/j.jvoice.2012.12.006
    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.
    Matched MeSH terms: Phonetics*
  20. Formant frequencies of Malay vowels produced by Malay children aged between 7 and 12 years
    Ting HN, Zourmand A, Chia SY, Yong BF, Abdul Hamid B
    J Voice, 2012 Sep;26(5):664.e1-6.
    PMID: 22285457 DOI: 10.1016/j.jvoice.2011.08.008
    The formant frequencies of Malaysian Malay children have not been well studied. This article investigates the first four formant frequencies of sustained vowels in 360 Malay children aged between 7 and 12 years using acoustical analysis. Generally, Malay female children had higher formant frequencies than those of their male counterparts. However, no significant differences in all four formant frequencies were observed between the Malay male and female children in most of the vowels and age groups. Significant differences in all formant frequencies were found across the Malay vowels in both Malay male and female children for all age groups except for F4 in female children aged 12 years. Generally, the Malaysian Malay children showed a nonsystematic decrement in formant frequencies with age. Low levels of significant differences in formant frequencies were observed across the age groups in most of the vowels for F1, F3, and F4 in Malay male children and F1 and F4 in Malay female children.
    Matched MeSH terms: Phonetics*
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