UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics Title

Despite the growing number of studies on the acoustics of non-modal phonation, little is known about how two distinct non-modal phonations can interact acoustically when coarticulated. This study investigates the acoustics of potential breathy-to-creaky phonation contours from a production study of native speakers of English, White Hmong, and Korean. These languages differ in the nature of the non-modal phonations. In the English corpus, both the breathiness and creakiness are allophonic. In the Hmong corpus, the breathiness is allophonic but the creakiness is phonemic. In the Korean corpus, the breathiness is arguably phonemic, and the creakiness is allophonic. The contours were analyzed using the three measures of phonation that were found to best differentiate non-modal from modal phonation in these languages: H1*H2*, H1*-A1*, and Harmonics-to-Noise Ratio. Results from these measures provide support for the presence of breathy-creaky contours in vowels. The duration and differentiation from modal values of the non-modal phonations are largely dependent on whether it is contrastive or allophonic, in support of Blankenship (2002). The limiting of extensive allophonic phonation coarticulation is taken as evidence of a modal feature specification on vowels of English, which lacks contrastive phonation on vowels. * This work is part of larger research project guided by Patricia Keating, Sun-Ah Jun, and Kie Zuraw, whom I thank for their assistance. I would also like to thank Megha Sundara for commenting on the initial stages of this work. I am also grateful to Yun Jung Kim, Victoria Thatte, Maxine Van Doren, and Kristine Yu for assisting me in recruiting and testing participants, and to Yen-Liang Shue for help with VoiceSauce. For help with piloting the experiment, I would like to thank Mel Bervoets, Jieun Kim, Yun Jung Kim, Chad Vicenik, and Jamie White. This work was supported by NSF grant BCS-0720304 and FQRSC grant 128451. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics, No. 108, pp. 66-112