The effects of lung volume initiation on speech: a perceptual study

Audio recordings were made while six vocally untrained individuals read sentences aloud after breathing to three different lung volume levels-typical, high, and low. A perceptual experiment was conducted on these speech samples. The perceptual experiment consisted of a two-alternative forced-choice design, in which listeners heard matched pairs of sentences and were asked to identify which sentence in the pair departed from normal sounding speech. The results of the perceptual experiment showed that listeners can accurately discriminate between speech produced at both lung volume extremes. The percentage of correct identification was higher for speech produced at low lung volumes than that for high lung volumes. Factors such as order of presentation and removal of SPL as an acoustic cue made little difference in the ability of listeners to discriminate lung volume level from the speech signals.