Perception of stop consonants in speech signals reconstructed from phase or amplitude

Abstract

It is well known that under certain conditions, a signal is completely specified either by its Fourier transform phase or amplitude. An iterative technique similar to that used by Hayes et al. [IEEE Trans. Acoust., Speech, Signal Process. ASSP‐28, 672–680 (1980)] was applied to the global Fourier transform phases or amplitudes of natural VCV (vowel–stop consonant–vowel) utterances and the perception of stop consonants was experimentally studied. Under a variety of conditions, the consonant identification performance in the phase‐only stimuli improved from about 66% to more than 90% after the iterations. The influence of the initial amplitude guess on the quality of the reconstructed signals was also investigated. The retrieval of stop consonant information from phase for various window lengths and various phase noise levels were analyzed with regard to vowel contexts, stop manner, and place of articulation. In contrast to the case of signal reconstruction from its phase, the stimulus reconstructed from th...