Articulatory Adjustments in Initial Voiced Stops in Spanish, French and English

This work reports cross-language differences in the voicing of initial voiced stops, and in the use of active maneuvers to achieve closure voicing, using multiparametric aerodynamic data. Oral pressure, oral and nasal flow, and acoustic data were obtained for utterance-initial /b d p t m/ for 10 speakers of Spanish, 6 speakers of French and 5 speakers of English. Voiced stops were classified as fully voiced or devoiced, and by shape of the oral pressure pulse (implosivized, other cavity enlarging maneuver) and/or occurrence of nasal flow (prenasalized) or oral flow (spirantized) during the stop phase in an attempt to relate aerodynamic data and actual glottal vibration to vocal-tract gestures and maneuvers to facilitate voicing. Maneuvers that favor the initiation (and sustaining) of voicing are then related to (i) language-specific differences in the use of glottal vibration during the constriction as a cue to voicing, (ii) place of articulation, and (iii) speaker dependent variation.