Speaking style dependency of formant targets

Previous work on formant targets has assumed that these targets are independent of the speaking style. In this paper, we estimate consonant and vowel targets in a database of “clear” and “conversational” speech, using both style-independent and style-dependent models. The test-set errors and clustering of the estimated target values indicate that for this corpus, formant targets depend on the speaking style. Vowel classification accuracy was then tested on estimated target values and compared with classification based on observed formant values. Tokenbased style-independent classification shows greater accuracy for conversational speech (82.19%) than observed-value classification (73.97%). Index Terms: formant target, clear speech, formant contour model.