DOCSLIB.ORG

Acoustic Differences Between English /T/ Glottalization and Phrasal Creak

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Acoustic Differences Between English /T/ Glottalization and Phrasal Creak INTERSPEECH 2016 September 8–12, 2016, San Francisco, USA Acoustic differences between English /t/ glottalization and phrasal creak Marc Garellek1, Scott Seyfarth1 1Department of Linguistics, UC San Diego [email protected], [email protected] (a) Non-glottalized, non-creaky (b) Glottalized, non-creaky Abstract 5000 5000 In American English, the presence of creaky voice can derive 4000 4000 from distinct linguistic processes, including phrasal creak (pro- 3000 3000 2000 2000 Frequency Frequency (Hz) longed irregular voicing, often at edges of prosodic phrases) and Frequency (Hz) coda /t/ glottalization (when the alveolar closure for syllable- 1000 1000 0 0 final /t/ is replaced by or produced simultaneously with glottal (c) Non-glottalized, creaky (d) Glottalized, creaky constriction). Previous work has shown that listeners can differ- 5000 5000 entiate words in phrasal creak from those with /t/ glottalization, 4000 4000 which suggests that there are acoustic differences between the 3000 3000 Frequency Frequency (Hz) creaky voice derived from phrasal creak and /t/ glottalization. 2000 Frequency (Hz) 2000 In this study, we analyzed vowels preceding syllable-final /t/ in 1000 1000 the Buckeye Corpus, which includes audio recordings of spon- 0 0 taneous speech from 40 speakers of American English. Tokens Time Time were coded for presence of phrasal creak (prolonged irregular voicing extending beyond the target syllable) and /t/ glottaliza- Figure 1: Sample spectrograms of ‘about,’ with presence of glot- tion (whether the /t/ was produced only with glottal constric- talization crossed with phrasal creak. The creaky tokens (panels tion). Eleven spectral measures of voice quality, including both c and d) are differentiated from the non-creaky ones (panels a harmonic and noise measures, were extracted automatically and and b) by irregularity throughout the vowels and voiced por- discriminant analyses were performed. The results indicate that tions of the word. In the glottalized productions (panels b and the discriminant functions can classify these sources of creaky d), there is also a distinct region of strong glottal irregularity voice above chance, and that Cepstral Peak Prominence, a mea- that is localized to the end of the syllable. sure of harmonics-to-noise ratio, is important for distinguishing phrasal creak from glottalization. Index Terms: creaky voice, phonation, glottalization, voice may span several words and appears on any voiced sound. In- deed, some speakers produce creaky voice over large portions 1. Introduction of phrases, and not just at the ends of prosodic domains. Such Creaky voice tends to have a low and irregular F0, as well as cases might be used to index speaker identity [12]. In our increased vocal fold constriction, relative to modal voice. How- study, we refer to both phrase-final creak and longer durations ever, previous studies have shown that numerous subtypes of of creaky voice as ‘phrasal creak.’ creaky voice exist [1, 2, 3]: some forms of creaky voice are Because /t/ glottalization and phrasal creak act on differ- constricted but have a regular F0, whereas other types are not ent domains (only on /t/ for glottalization; over long strings of constricted but are irregular in F0 [3, 4]. In this study, we test segments for phrasal creak), these two sources of creaky voice whether different linguistic sources of creaky voice are pro- can co-occur on a particular word. For example, the bottom- duced with different acoustic characteristics. right panel of Figure 1 shows a token of ‘about’ with both /t/ In American English, creaky voice has several distinct lin- glottalization (as seen by the lack of stop closure and [t] release guistic origins. First, creaky voice may occur as a result of burst) and phrasal creak (as seen by the irregular voicing over so-called ‘/t/ glottalization,’ the phenomenon in which glottal the entire word). Can listeners disambiguate between different constriction is produced simultaneously with or instead of /t/ linguistic sources of creaky voice? It has been shown that En- [5,6,7,8]. For example, the word ‘about’ can be produced with- glish listeners are able to disambiguate words with /t/ glottaliza- out glottalization as [@baUt], or as glottalized [@baUP]. Glottal- tion (e.g. ‘atlas’ [æPl@s]) from non-glottalized counterparts (e.g. ized and non-glottalized tokens of ‘about’ are shown in the top ‘Alice’ [æl@s]), even when the latter occur in phrasal creak [13]. row of Figure 1. The glottalized token (top-right, panel b) shows This suggests that there are systematic acoustic differences be- an increasing glottal period and greater F0 irregularity towards tween /t/ glottalization and phrasal creak. However, this previ- as the vowel progresses, with no identifiable stop closure or re- ous study used stimuli from laboratory speech recorded by only lease burst associated with the coda /t/. In contrast, a clear one phonetically trained speaker. This leaves it unclear as to stop closure and release burst can be seen in the non-glottalized which acoustic features are perceptually relevant and robust for token (top-left, panel a). disambiguating /t/ glottalization from phrasal creak, and which Another source of creaky voice in American English is may be idiosyncratic. phrase-final creak, the phenomenon in which ends of prosodic In this paper, we investigate whether English speakers pro- phrases are creaky [9,10]. In contrast to /t/ glottalization, which duce /t/ glottalization and phrasal creak with different kinds of affects only coda /t/ of a single word [11], phrase-final creak creaky voice in spontaneous speech that are acoustically well- Copyright 2016 ISCA 1054 http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2016-1472 discriminated. If indeed they do, this would suggest that dif- (HNR05), and subharmonics-to-harmonics ratio (SHR), which ferent subtypes of creaky voice can be utilized for different lin- measures the amplitude difference between the harmonics and guistic purposes (e.g. /t/ glottalization vs. phrasal creak) – that subharmonics in the signal [21]. Because F0 tends to be irreg- is, subtypes of creaky voice can contrast within a particular lan- ular during prototypical creaky voice, we expect both CPP and guage. HNR05 to be lower in creakier voice qualities [3, 22]. More- over, the frequent occurrence of period-doubled phonation dur- 2. Corpus data ing creaky voice should increase the SHR [3]. The seven re- maining measures were estimates of spectral tilt in various fre- The recordings used in this study were obtained from the Buck- quency bands. All of these seven measures are expected to be eye Corpus of spontaneous American English [14], which con- lower in creakier voice qualities, because of the increased glot- tains speech of 40 adults (gender-balanced) from Ohio. The tal constriction and/or abrupt glottal closure [3,22,23]. Because recordings took place in a quiet room and were digitized at 16 these measures also vary as a function of vowel quality, they kHz with 16-bit resolution. The corpus has canonical phonemic were corrected for vowel formants, following [24], which al- transcriptions for each word (generated by automatic alignment lows for cross-vowel comparisons in voice quality. Corrected software), as well as narrow phonetic transcriptions, which were measures are shown with asterisks. made by corpus annotators who hand-corrected the labeling and Due to the importance of correct F0 tracking for many of segmentation of the canonical phonemic transcriptions. these measures, we took two steps to exclude tokens that were We analyzed the following subset of the corpus, which likely mistracked. First, we excluded 414 tokens which con- is taken from the dataset constructed for and described in tained at least one analysis frame in which F0 was either half or [15], summarized here with additional exclusions and hand- double the F0 value in the previous frame (within a 10% mar- corrections. Words with syllable-final /t/ in the canonical form gin). While F0 may drop rapidly during creaky voice, an octave were extracted from the corpus, based on a syllabification al- jump is most likely to be a tracking error. Second, we stan- gorithm adapted from [16]. We selected only tokens of coda dardized F0 within two groups within each speaker: modal [t] /t/ that were preceded by a vowel at least 50 ms long (as short tokens, and tokens with phrasal creak and/or glottalization. We samples are problematic for voice analyses), were not part of a excluded tokens with a mean F0 > 2.5 standard deviations from complex coda (e.g., excluding ‘kept’, ‘rant’), and which were each speaker’s modal or creaky mean, as appropriate. realized phonetically as a voiceless stop [t] or as a glottal stop Finally, outliers > 2.5 standard deviations from each [P]. 11,947 tokens in the corpus met these initial criteria. We speaker’s mean on any of the acoustic measures were excluded hand-inspected each token, and excluded 346 tokens that were (excluding F0; 11.1% of the total data). Overall, 8,936 vowels disfluent, were misaligned, or had noisy or clipped recordings. were analyzed, whose distributions into the four groups (non- Glottal stops were identified based on the provided corpus glottalized non-creaky, non-glottalized creaky, glottalized non- annotations, and verified during hand-inspection. An instance creaky, and glottalized creaky) are shown in Table 3. of /t/ was considered to be realized as a glottal stop if it had irregular voicing localized to the onset and offset of the target coda, and no [t] release burst. The provided annotations were Table 1: Acoustic measures used in the discriminant analysis. found to be largely accurate: of the 6,044 glottal stops meeting Included in the analysis were averages of each measure, as well the criteria, only 462 (7.6%) were hand-corrected to a [t], and as changes between the first and final third of the target vowel.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Phonological Use of the Larynx: a Tutorial Jacqueline Vaissière
    Phonological use of the larynx: a tutorial Jacqueline Vaissière To cite this version: Jacqueline Vaissière. Phonological use of the larynx: a tutorial. Larynx 97, 1994, Marseille, France. pp.115-126. halshs-00703584 HAL Id: halshs-00703584 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00703584 Submitted on 3 Jun 2012 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Vaissière, J., (1997), "Phonological use of the larynx: a tutorial", Larynx 97, Marseille, 115-126. PHONOLOGICAL USE OF THE LARYNX J. Vaissière UPRESA-CNRS 1027, Institut de Phonétique, Paris, France larynx used as a carrier of paralinguistic information . RÉSUMÉ THE PRIMARY FUNCTION OF THE LARYNX Cette communication concerne le rôle du IS PROTECTIVE larynx dans l'acte de communication. Toutes As stated by Sapir, 1923, les langues du monde utilisent des physiologically, "speech is an overlaid configurations caractéristiques du larynx, aux function, or to be more precise, a group of niveaux segmental, lexical, et supralexical. Nous présentons d'abord l'utilisation des différents types de phonation pour distinguer entre les consonnes et les voyelles dans les overlaid functions. It gets what service it can langues du monde, et également du larynx out of organs and functions, nervous and comme lieu d'articulation des glottales, et la muscular, that come into being and are production des éjectives et des implosives.
    [Show full text]
  • Part 1: Introduction to The
    PREVIEW OF THE IPA HANDBOOK Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A guide to the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet PARTI Introduction to the IPA 1. What is the International Phonetic Alphabet? The aim of the International Phonetic Association is to promote the scientific study of phonetics and the various practical applications of that science. For both these it is necessary to have a consistent way of representing the sounds of language in written form. From its foundation in 1886 the Association has been concerned to develop a system of notation which would be convenient to use, but comprehensive enough to cope with the wide variety of sounds found in the languages of the world; and to encourage the use of thjs notation as widely as possible among those concerned with language. The system is generally known as the International Phonetic Alphabet. Both the Association and its Alphabet are widely referred to by the abbreviation IPA, but here 'IPA' will be used only for the Alphabet. The IPA is based on the Roman alphabet, which has the advantage of being widely familiar, but also includes letters and additional symbols from a variety of other sources. These additions are necessary because the variety of sounds in languages is much greater than the number of letters in the Roman alphabet. The use of sequences of phonetic symbols to represent speech is known as transcription. The IPA can be used for many different purposes. For instance, it can be used as a way to show pronunciation in a dictionary, to record a language in linguistic fieldwork, to form the basis of a writing system for a language, or to annotate acoustic and other displays in the analysis of speech.
    [Show full text]
  • UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Phonlab Annual Report
    UC Berkeley UC Berkeley PhonLab Annual Report Title The Phonetic Structures of Oaxaca Chontal Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4bn7h6v0 Journal UC Berkeley PhonLab Annual Report, 1(1) ISSN 2768-5047 Authors Maddieson, Ian Avelino, Heriberto O'Connor, Loretta Publication Date 2005 DOI 10.5070/P74bn7h6v0 eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2005) THE PHONETIC STRUCTURES OF OAXACA CHONTAL Ian Maddieson*, Heriberto Avelino* and Loretta O'Connor** *University of California, Berkeley **University of Hamburg, Center for Mesoamerican Studies Abstract The first description in any detail of aspects of the phonetic structures of the highly endangered Lowland variety of Oaxaca Chontal is presented. The paper includes measurements of the characteristics of the vowels, and a survey of the principal features of the consonant system. Particular attention is paid to the series of glottalized obstruents and sonorants, which vary a great deal in their manner of articulation and the nature and timing of the accompanying glottalization. The relative frequency of different realizations of the glottalized obstruents mirrors the cross- language frequency of glottalized consonant types. Glottalized sonorant realizations cannot be predicted from their position in the syllable. Individual speakers frequently vary when producing consecutive repetitions of the same word. Such a large range of variation may be partly due to an ongoing process of language attrition. Keywords
    [Show full text]
  • An Acoustic Account of the Allophonic Realization of /T/ Amber King St
    Linguistic Portfolios Volume 1 Article 12 2012 An Acoustic Account of the Allophonic Realization of /T/ Amber King St. Cloud State University Ettien Koffi St. Cloud State University Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/stcloud_ling Part of the Applied Linguistics Commons Recommended Citation King, Amber and Koffi, Ettien (2012) "An Acoustic Account of the Allophonic Realization of /T/," Linguistic Portfolios: Vol. 1 , Article 12. Available at: https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/stcloud_ling/vol1/iss1/12 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by theRepository at St. Cloud State. It has been accepted for inclusion in Linguistic Portfolios by an authorized editor of theRepository at St. Cloud State. For more information, please contact [email protected]. King and Koffi: An Acoustic Account of the Allophonic Realization of /T/ AN ACOUSTIC ACCOUNT OF THE ALLOPHONIC REALIZATIONS OF /T/ AMBER KING AND ETTIEN KOFFI 1.0 Introduction This paper is a laboratory phonology account of the different pronunciations of the phoneme /t/. Laboratory phonology is a relatively new analytical tool that is being used to validate and verify claims made by phonologists about the pronunciation of sounds. It is customary for phonologists to predict on the basis of auditory impressions and intuition alone that allophones exist for such and such phonemes. An allophone is defined as different realizations of the same phoneme based on the environments in which it occurs. For instance, it has been proposed that the phoneme /t/ has anywhere from four to eight allophones in General American English (GAE). To verify this claim Amber, one of the co-author of this paper recorded herself saying the words <still>, <Tim>, <kit>, <bitter>, <kitten>, <winter>, <fruition>, <furniture>, and <listen>.
    [Show full text]
  • Proposal for Superscript Diacritics for Prenasalization, Preglottalization, and Preaspiration
    1 Proposal for superscript diacritics for prenasalization, preglottalization, and preaspiration Patricia Keating Department of Linguistics, UCLA [email protected] Daniel Wymark Department of Linguistics, UCLA [email protected] Ryan Sharif Department of Linguistics, UCLA [email protected] ABSTRACT The IPA currently does not specify how to represent prenasalization, preglottalization, or preaspiration. We first review some current transcription practices, and phonetic and phonological literature bearing on the unitary status of prenasalized, preglottalized and preaspirated segments. We then propose that the IPA adopt superscript diacritics placed before a base symbol for these three phenomena. We also suggest how the current IPA Diacritics chart can be modified to allow these diacritics to be fit within the chart. 2 1 Introduction The IPA provides a variety of diacritics which can be added to base symbols in various positions: above ([a͂ ]), below ([n̥ ]), through ([ɫ]), superscript after ([tʰ]), or centered after ([a˞]). Currently, IPA diacritics which modify base symbols are never shown preceding them; the only diacritics which precede are the stress marks, i.e. primary ([ˈ]) and secondary ([ˌ]) stress. Yet, in practice, superscript diacritics are often used preceding base symbols; specifically, they are often used to notate prenasalization, preglottalization and preaspiration. These terms are very common in phonetics and phonology, each having thousands of Google hits. However, none of these phonetic phenomena is included on the IPA chart or mentioned in Part I of the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association (IPA 1999), and thus there is currently no guidance given to users about transcribing them. In this note we review these phenomena, and propose that the Association’s alphabet include superscript diacritics preceding the base symbol for prenasalization, preglottalization and preaspiration, in accord with one common way of transcribing them.
    [Show full text]
  • Acoustic Discriminability of the Complex Phonation System in !Xó˜O
    Acoustic discriminability of the complex phonation system in !Xo´o˜ Marc Garellek Department of Linguistics University of California, San Diego (September 2018 version, to appear in Phonetica) 9500 Gilman Drive #0108, La Jolla, CA 92093-0108 USA Phone: +1 858 534 2412 Fax: +1 858 534 4789 Email: [email protected] Keywords: voice quality, phonation types, harsh voice Page 1 of 42 Abstract Phonation types, or contrastive voice qualities, are minimally produced using complex movements of the vocal folds, but may additionally involve constriction in the supraglottal and pharyngeal cav- ities. These complex articulations in turn produce a multidimensional acoustic output that can be modeled in various ways. In this study, I investigate whether the psychoacoustic model of voice by Kreiman et al. (2014) succeeds at distinguishing six phonation types of !Xo´o.˜ Linear discriminant analysis is performed using parameters from the model averaged over the entire vowel as well as for the first and final halves of the vowel. The results indicate very high classification accuracy for all phonation types. Measures averaged over the vowel’s entire duration are closely correlated with the discriminant functions, suggesting that they are sufficient for distinguishing even dynamic phonation types. Measures from all classes of parameters are correlated with the linear discrimi- nant functions; in particular, the ‘strident’ vowels, which are harsh in quality, are characterized by their noise, changes in spectral tilt, decrease in voicing amplitude and frequency, and raising of the first formant. Despite the large number of contrasts and the time-varying characteristics of many of the phonation types, the phonation contrasts in !Xo´o˜ remain well differentiated acoustically.
    [Show full text]
  • Why Do Glottal Stops and Low Vowels Like Each Other?
    ICPhS XVII Regular Session Hong Kong, 17-21 August 2011 WHY DO GLOTTAL STOPS AND LOW VOWELS LIKE EACH OTHER? Jana Brunner & Marzena Żygis Centre for General Linguistics, Berlin, Germany [email protected]; [email protected] ABSTRACT 1.1. Phonological processes The aim of the present study is two-fold. First, we In Klallam (a Salish language), the non-low will show that glottal stops/glottalization and low vowels /i u ə/ are lowered to /ε o a/, respectively, w vowels are likely to co-occur in typologically when followed by [ʔ]. For example, /pʔíх ŋ/ is w different languages. Second, we will investigate pronounced as [pʔεʔх ŋ] ‘overflow’/‘overflowing’ the question whether this widely attested co- and /šúpt/ as [šóʔpt] ‘whistle’/‘whistling’ [17]. occurrence of glottalization and low vowels could In the reduplication processes in Nisgha (a be due to a perceptual phenomenon; i.e. Tsimshianic language) the quality of the vowel in differences in the perception of vowel quality of the prefix depends on the surrounding segments. If glottalized as compared to non-glottalized vowels. the stem starts with a coronal stop, the vowel in the We hypothesized that vowels are perceived lower prefix is also coronal: /tamʔ/ is reduplicated to in their height if they are glottalized. In order to [tim-tamʔ] ‘to press’ but if the initial-stem test our hypothesis we conducted a perceptual consonant is a glottal stop the vowel in the prefix experiment with two German continua of b[i]ten- is the low vowel [a]: /ʔux/ is pronounced as [ʔax- b[e]ten (‘to offer’, ‘to pray’), a non-glottalized and ʔux] ‘to throw’ ([14], [15]).
    [Show full text]
  • The Effect of Whisper and Creak Vocal Mechanisms on Vocal Tract Resonances
    The effect of whisper and creak vocal mechanisms on vocal tract resonances ͒ Yoni Swerdlin, John Smith,a and Joe Wolfe School of Physics, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales 2052, Australia ͑Received 12 May 2009; revised 20 January 2010; accepted 21 January 2010͒ The frequencies of vocal tract resonances estimated using whisper and creak phonations are compared with those in normal phonation for subjects who produced pairs of these phonations in the same vocal gesture. Peaks in the spectral envelope were used to measure the frequencies of the first four resonances ͑R1–R4͒ for the non-periodic phonations, and broadband excitation at the mouth was used to measure them with similar precision in normal phonation. For resonances R1–R4, whispering raises the average resonant frequencies by 255 Hz with standard deviation 90 Hz, 115Ϯ105, 125Ϯ125, and 75Ϯ120 Hz, respectively. A simple one dimensional model of the vocal tract is presented and used to show how an effective glottal area can be estimated from shifts in resonance frequency measured during the same vocal gesture. Calculations suggest that the effective glottal area thus defined increases to 40Ϯ30 mm2 during whispering. Creak phonation raised significantly only the first and third resonant frequencies, by 45Ϯ50 and 65Ϯ120 Hz respectively. It thus appears possible to use creak phonation to determine resonances with more precision than is available from the spectral envelope of voiced speech, and this supports its use in teaching resonance tuning to singers. © 2010 Acoustical Society of America. ͓DOI: 10.1121/1.3316288͔ PACS number͑s͒: 43.70.Gr, 43.70.Aj, 43.70.Bk ͓CHS͔ Pages: 2590–2598 I.
    [Show full text]
  • Linguistic Voice Quality
    Linguistic voice quality Pat Keating UCLA Linguistics Department back Phonation Phonation: sound production in the larynx, usually by vocal fold vibration (voice, or voicing) How fast the folds vibrate determines front voice pitch; how they move determines voice quality These vary across speakers (people’s voices sound different) and within speakers (individuals can adjust vibration) 2 Ladefoged gif: http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/faciliti/demos/vocalfolds/vocalfolds.htm Some examples by John Laver - 3 major phonation types Laver modal voice Laver breathy voice Laver creaky voice 3 Cassette with Laver 1980, The Phonetic Description of Voice Quality Phonation types and glottal opening How large is the glottal opening? back 2 vocal folds glottis (space between) front 4 http://pixgood.com/glottis-and-epiglottis.html Ladefoged’s glottal continuum IPA diacritics: a̤ a̰ On the breathy side of modal: lax, slack, or lenis On the creaky side of modal: tense, stiff, fortis, or pressed 5 Ladefoged (1971) Preliminaries to linguistic phonetics Phonation contrasts in languages of the world Many languages contrast phonations on vowels and/or consonants Common especially in SE Asia, the Americas, India 6 UCLA Linguistic Voice Quality project How do phonation types (on vowels) differ within and across languages? This talk: Cross-language comparison of vowel phonation acoustics: What is the overall phonetic space for vowel voice quality? Phonation in tone languages: How do pitch and phonation interact? 7 Our project: 10 languages from four language families Sino-Tibetan Hmong-Mien *Yi (Southern: Xinping & Jiangcheng) *Hmong (White Hmong) lax vs. tense modal vs breathy H-falling tone, crossed with L, M lexical tones creaky L tone, others modal *Bo (Shizong & Xingfucun) – like Yi *Black Miao (Shidong Kou) *Hani (Luchun) – like Yi modal vs breathy M tone, creaky L tone, pressed H tone *Mandarin (Beijing) – creaky tone3 Oto-Manguean Indo-European Mazatec (Jalapa de Diaz) *Gujarati (Standard Mumbai) breathy vs.
    [Show full text]
  • Gender and the Social Meaning of Non-Modal Phonation Types Author(S): Robert J
    Gender and the social meaning of non-modal phonation types Author(s): Robert J. Podesva Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (2013), pp. 427-448 Editors: Chundra Cathcart, I-Hsuan Chen, Greg Finley, Shinae Kang, Clare S. Sandy, and Elise Stickles Please contact BLS regarding any further use of this work. BLS retains copyright for both print and screen forms of the publication. BLS may be contacted via http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/bls/. The Annual Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society is published online via eLanguage, the Linguistic Society of America's digital publishing platform. Gender and the Social Meaning of Non-Modal Phonation Types ROBERT J. PODESVA Stanford University 1 Introduction Although sociophoneticians often remark on the dearth of linguistic research on voice quality, the last decade has witnessed a significant increase in the number of studies examining variation in voice quality (Stuart-Smith 1999, Lefkowitz and Sicoli 2007, Mendoza-Denton 2007, Szakay 2008, Nielsen 2010, Yuasa 2010, Sicoli 2010, Chun and Podesva 2010, Lopez 2010). While the term voice quality is used to refer to various articulatory configurations of the larynx, velum, tongue, and lips with consequences for phonation, nasality, and tenseness I limit my scope to the laryngeal properties of voice quality. By phonation, I refer to the configuration of the vocal folds during speech. Much of the literature on phonation has linked specific non-modal phonation types to gender, which will be my primary concern in this paper. The proposed connections between particular phonation types and gender have been both direct and indirect.
    [Show full text]
  • Acoustic Properties of Different Kinds of Creaky Voice
    Acoustic properties of different kinds of creaky voice Patricia Keating1, Marc Garellek2, Jody Kreiman3 1Dept. Linguistics, UCLA, Los Angeles CA USA 90095; 2Dept. Linguistics, UCSD, San Diego CA USA 92093, 3Dept. Head & Neck Surgery, UCLA, Los Angeles CA USA 90095 [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] ABSTRACT “amplitude modulation” - plus a highly aperiodic “noisy” type. They demonstrated that these three There is not one kind, but instead several kinds, of types are perceptually distinct to ordinary listeners. creaky voice, or creak. There is no single defining They also described “vocal fry”, with visibly property shared by all kinds. Instead, each kind damped pulses. Second, Redi and Shattuck- exhibits some properties but not others. Therefore Hufnagel [35] distinguished four types of creaky different acoustic measures characterize different voice: irregular “aperiodicity”, damped, low-F0 kinds of creak. This paper describes how various “creak”, “diplophonia” (with any kind of alternating acoustic measures should pattern for each kind of pulse frequency, amplitude, or shape), and the rare creak. “squeak” (with a sudden sustained high F0). Redi and Shattuck-Hufnagel showed that not only do Keywords: phonation, voice quality, creaky voice these types vary across speakers, but also across positions-in-utterance for individual speakers. 1. INTRODUCTION In this paper we build on these previous studies about different kinds of creak from the perspective The term “creaky voice” (or “creak”, used here of researchers performing varied acoustic analyses interchangeably) refers to a number of different of a range of voice samples. If each acoustic kinds of voice production. Early linguistic measure reflects a specific aspect of creak, and if descriptions of creak (e.g.
    [Show full text]
  • Phonation Types
    Outline for W Nov 7 | Ling 520 · Fall 2018 Quick links: Home Daily syllabus Schedule Online course materials Links for assignments Phonation types Background reading: V&C Ch 13, sec 13.4-13.7 (glottal stops, phonation types, etc.) AAP Ch 8, sec 8.1.1, "Phonation types" 1. States of the glottis VF wide open VF adducted (not too tightly) VF tightly closed voicelessness voicing/phonation glottal stop (also voiceless) Review: What predictions can we make for the acoustics of the glottal stop in the source-filter model? What do we predict during the closure phase? Do we predict a stop burst? Why or why not? What do we predict about formant transitions? In addition, there are different types of phonation along this continuum 2. Creaky phonation Vocal folds are closed during a higher percentage of the phonation cycle than in modal phonation Creaky voicing: VF closed for approx. 2/3 of cycle Modal voicing: VF closed for approx. 1/2 of cycle How creaky voicing is produced: configuration of vocal folds Generally adducted more tightly May be totally closed along part of their length and vibrating only along another part Used in English for sociolinguistic effects — older upper-class British speakers; younger American speakers Used in other languages to distinguish speech sound categories How do we transcribe creaky phonation? Examples from V&C reading and class web sites — see Mazatec See also the South American Phonological Inventory Database for lists of languages that use creaky phonation WALS map: Red symbols show languages with "glottalized resonants" (i.e., sonorants, most likely with creaky phonation) 3.
    [Show full text]