Acoustical Analysis of Speech Under Physical Stress in Relation to Physical Activities and Physical Literacy

Human speech production encompasses physiological processes that naturally react to physic stress. Stress caused by physical activity (PA), e.g., running, may lead to significant changes in a person’s speech. The major changes are related to the aspects of pitch level, speaking rate, pause pattern, and breathiness. The extent of change depends presumably on physical fitness and well-being of the person, as well as intensity of PA. The general wellness of a person is further related to his/her physical literacy (PL), which refers to a holistic description of engagement in PA. This paper presents the development of a Cantonese speech database that contains audio recordings of speech before and after physical exercises of different intensity levels. The corpus design and data collection process are described. Preliminary results of acoustical analysis are presented to illustrate the impact of PA on pitch level, pitch range, speaking and articulation rate, and time duration of pauses. It is also noted that the effect of PA is correlated to some of the PA and PL measures.

[1]  E. Zee.  Chinese (Hong Kong Cantonese) , 1991, Journal of the International Phonetic Association.

[2]  Klaus Zechner,et al.  The importance of optimal parameter setting for pitch extraction. , 2010 .

[3]  Daniel Povey,et al.  The Kaldi Speech Recognition Toolkit , 2011 .

[4]  Amélie Rochet-Capellan,et al.  The interplay of linguistic structure and breathing in German spontaneous speech , 2013, INTERSPEECH.

[5]  John H. L. Hansen,et al.  Physical task stress and speaker variability in voice quality , 2015, EURASIP J. Audio Speech Music. Process..

[6]  Tristan L. Wallhead,et al.  Perceived physical literacy instrument for adolescents: A further validation of PPLI , 2018, Journal of exercise science and fitness.

[7]  R. Sum,et al.  Relationship between perceived physical literacy and physical activity levels among Hong Kong adolescents , 2018, PloS one.

[8]  J. Karvonen,et al.  Heart Rate and Exercise Intensity During Sports Activities , 1988, Sports medicine.

[9]  Bhavesh Kumar,et al.  Physical activity and health in adolescence. , 2015, Clinical medicine.

[10]  Alessandro Vinciarelli,et al.  The voice of personality: mapping nonverbal vocal behavior into trait attributions , 2010, SSPW '10.

[11]  Robert S. Bauer,et al.  Modern Cantonese Phonology , 1997 .

[12]  K. Morgan,et al.  Definitions, Foundations and Associations of Physical Literacy: A Systematic Review , 2016, Sports Medicine.

[13]  P. Schönle,et al.  Speech and respiration , 1979, Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten.

[14]  Tan Lee,et al.  Spoken language resources for Cantonese speech processing , 2002, Speech Commun..

[15]  Elena A. Boiarskaia,et al.  Canadian Agility and Movement Skill Assessment (CAMSA): Validity, objectivity, and reliability evidence for children 8–12 years of age , 2015, Journal of sport and health science.

[16]  Jürgen Trouvain,et al.  Prosodic characteristics of read speech before and after treadmill running , 2015, INTERSPEECH.

[17]  Rebecca Hincks,et al.  Processing the prosody of oral presentations , 2004 .

[18]  J. L. Germain,et al.  The Relationship Between Perceived and Actual Physical Fitness: A Meta-Analysis , 2006 .

[19]  Joel D. Barnes,et al.  Canadian Assessment of Physical Literacy Second Edition: a streamlined assessment of the capacity for physical activity among children 8 to 12 years of age , 2018, BMC Public Health.

[20]  R. Shephard.  PAR-Q, Canadian Home Fitness Test and Exercise Screening Alternatives , 1988, Sports medicine.

[21]  Stéphane Rauzy,et al.  Automatic detection and prediction of topic changes through automatic detection of register variations and pause duration , 2009, INTERSPEECH.

[22]  Anders Eriksson,et al.  The frequency range of the voice fundamental in the speech of male and female adults , 1993 .

[23]  Liukkonen Jarmo,et al.  Perceived physical competence towards physical activity, and motivation and enjoyment in physical education as longitudinal predictors of adolescents' self-reported physical activity. , 2016, Journal of science and medicine in sport.

[24]  V. Dellwo,et al.  Comparing native and non-native speech rhythm using acoustic rhythmic measures: Cantonese, Beijing Mandarin and English , 2008 .

[25]  K. M. Chan,et al.  A Clinical Tool for Office Assessment of Lumbar Spine Stabilization Endurance: Prone and Supine Bridge Maneuvers , 2007, American journal of physical medicine & rehabilitation.

[26]  P. Boersma.  ACCURATE SHORT-TERM ANALYSIS OF THE FUNDAMENTAL FREQUENCY AND THE HARMONICS-TO-NOISE RATIO OF A SAMPLED SOUND , 1993 .

[27]  Mengyu Fan,et al.  [Chinese guidelines for data processing and analysis concerning the International Physical Activity Questionnaire]. , 2014, Zhonghua liu xing bing xue za zhi = Zhonghua liuxingbingxue zazhi.

[28]  Bart de Boer,et al.  Introducing Parselmouth: A Python interface to Praat , 2018, J. Phonetics.

[29]  Vanessa Evers,et al.  A database for analysis of speech under physical stress: detection of exercise intensity while running and talking , 2015, INTERSPEECH.

[30]  Mark J. F. Gales,et al.  Maximum likelihood linear transformations for HMM-based speech recognition , 1998, Comput. Speech Lang..

[31]  A F Kramer,et al.  Social relations, physical activity, and well-being in older adults. , 2000, Preventive medicine.

[32]  Stacy N. Scott,et al.  The ability of the PACER to elicit peak exercise response in youth [corrected]. , 2013, Medicine and science in sports and exercise.

[33]  Patrick Kenny,et al.  Front-End Factor Analysis for Speaker Verification , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing.

[34]  Margaret Whitehead,et al.  Physical literacy : throughout the lifecourse , 2010 .