The impact of head and body postures on the acoustic speech signal

This dissertation is aimed at investigating the impact of postural changes within speakers on the acoustic speech signal to complement research on articulatory changes under the same conditions. The research is therefore relevant for forensic phonetics, where quantifying within-speaker variation is vital for the accuracy of speaker comparison. To this end, two acoustic studies were carried out to quantify the influence of five head positions and three body orientations on the acoustic speech signal. Results show that there is a consistent change in the third formant, a change which was most evident in the body orientation measurements, and to a lesser extent in the head position data. Analysis of the results with respect to compensation strategies indicates that speakers employ different strategies to compensate for these perturbations to their vocal tract. Some speakers did not exhibit large differences in their speech signal, while others appeared to compensate much less. Across all speakers, the effect was much stronger in what were deemed ‘less natural’, postures. That is, speakers were apparently less able to predict and compensate for the impact of prone body orientation on their speech than for that of the more natural supine orientation. In addition to the acoustic studies, a perception experiment assessed whether listeners could make use of acoustic cues to determine the posture of the speaker. Stimuli were chosen with, by design, stronger or weaker acoustic cues to posture, in order to elicit a possible difference in identification performance. Listeners were nevertheless not able to identify above chance whether a speaker was sitting or lying in prone body orientation even when hearing the set with stronger cues. Further combined articulatory and acoustic research will have to be carried out to disentangle which articulatory behaviours correlate with the acoustic changes presented in order to draw a more comprehensive picture of the effects of postural variation on speech.This work was supported by the Art and Humanities Research Council