Large-scale analysis of formant frequency estimation variability in conversational telephone speech

Abstract

We quantify how the telephone channel and regional dialect influence formant estimates extracted from Wavesurfer [1, 2] in spontaneous conversational speech from over 3,600 native American English speakers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest scale study on this topic. We found that F1 estimates are higher in cellular channels than those in landline, while F2 in general shows an opposite trend. We also characterized vowel shift trends in northern states in U.S.A. and compared them with the Northern city chain shift (NCCS) [3]. Our analysis is useful in forensic applications where it is important to distinguish between speaker, dialect, and channel characterisitcs.