The 1134 utterances, where both subjects identified the presence of breathiness, were used for subsequent analysis.
We evaluated the speech decoding setups using the utterance error rate (UER), which is the percentage of utterances where the 1-Best decoding result deviates from the transcription.
As an illustration, Figure 1a shows a cochleagram of a cochannel signal at −9 dB consisting of two male utterances, where a brighter unit indicates stronger energy.
My reasoning arises from the observation that there is a notable rhetorical difference between utterances where the writer relies on the reader to make an attitudinal inference (evoking) and utterances where the reader is given signals that an attitudinal value is being offered (provoking).
Set A contains 4004 utterances in the first four types of noise, set B contains 4004 utterances in the other four, and set C contains 2002 utterances, where only subway and street noise are present.
Paralinguistic information (PI) was annotated by two subjects (one with some experience in PI annotation, and the other without any experience), for the 1134 utterances where breathiness was perceived.
In the present work, considering that our voice quality data is based on auditory impression, we use the terms "breathy" and "breathiness" in a broad sense, indicating all utterances where turbulent noise is audibly perceived in the vowel segments.
Moreover, Donald Davidson (1979, 1984a) stressed that no conventional sign could work as a force indicator in this sense, since any conventional sign could be used (and would be used) in insincere utterances, where the corresponding force was missing, including cases of deception, jokes, impersonation and other theatrical performances.
For the utterances where breathiness was perceived (excluding the laughing speech utterances), a more detailed segmentation and annotation of voice quality was conducted for evaluating the acoustic features introduced in Section 2. The segmentation was conducted by the first author, based on visual inspection of the spectrograms and on auditory impression.
