HQSYN16

In RA2, the work focused on the perceptual testing of intrusive phenomena, mostly in the spectral domain and in the domain of fundamental frequency (F0). Preliminary analyses revealed that a great majority of the problems resulting from contextual incongruity (i.e., the effect of labial, palatal, or nasal contexts; see RA2a) can be captured by the formant values (RA2c). This led to the creation of a perception test where formant frequencies were manipulated in a controlled way so as to create artificial discontinuities. Subsequent perceptual testing showed that formant discontinuities may have serious perceptual repercussions, affecting the perceived length of the vowels in question; since Czech is a language with distinctive vowel length, this was a very important finding, published in Interspeech 2017 proceedings. F0 shifts (RA2b) yielded no such effects, but work is currently continuing on preparing more sophisticated F0 discontinuities (see RA3c).