The acoustic signature for intelligibility test words

As part of a research program that aims to develop an explicit acoustic basis for a single-word intelligibility test, an initial attempt to characterize the formant trajectories and segment durations of seven test words produced by 30 normal speakers is described. These characterizations are referred to as "acoustic signatures." The data indicate that: (1) formant trajectories show two sex effects, namely, that females are more variable as a group than males and tend to have greater slopes for the transitional segment of the second-formant trajectories and that these effects are consistent across words; (2) Bark transformations of the frequency data do not seem to eliminate the interspeaker differences in formant trajectories, nor do they eliminate either of the sex effects described above; and (3) segment durations have different variabilities depending on the syllabic structure of the word; no sex effect was noted here. The discussion focuses on the appropriate form for the acoustic signatures, as well as factors that should be considered in selecting words for signature development. To demonstrate the potential application of these data, formant trajectory and segment duration data from 18 speakers with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and varying degrees of dysarthria are compared to the acoustic signature for the word wax.