Phonation Contrasts across Languages
نویسندگان
چکیده
This study compares the phonetics of phonation categories within and across four languages: Gujarati (modal, breathy), White Hmong (modal, breathy, creaky), Jalapa Mazatec (modal, breathy, creaky), and Southern Yi (tense, lax). In addition to acoustic measures in all four languages, electroglottographic measures were also compared for Gujarati, Hmong, and Yi. Several measures distinguished phonation categories within each language, although only H1*-H2* and CQ did so in all languages measured. When within-language phonation categories were then compared across languages, they were found to differ across languages on multiple acoustic measures, e.g. Hmong breathy voice is distinct from Gujarati breathy voice. This unexpected result suggests that language/speaker/recording differences are larger than phonation category differences, a claim that finds support in a Multidimensional Scaling analysis of the acoustics. A three-dimensional space turns out to mostly distinguish languages rather than phonations; the phonation categories do not form clusters in this space across languages, but they do occupy separate regions along the dimension of the space correlated with H1*-H2*. Thus, H1*-H2* is seen to be the most important measure of phonation contrasts across languages.
منابع مشابه
The acoustic consequences of phonation and tone interactions in Jalapa Mazatec
San Felipe Jalapa de D ⁄ ıaz (Jalapa) Mazatec is unusual in possessing a three-way phonation contrast and three-way level tone contrast independent of phonation. This study investigates the acoustics of how phonation and tone interact in this language, and how such interactions are maintained across variables like speaker sex, vowel timecourse, and presence of aspiration in the onset. Using a l...
متن کاملRegisters in Tonal Contrasts
This study revisits the issue of tonal registers by exploring the cues used in producing and perceiving the five level tones of Black Miao. Both production and perception experiments show that non-modal phonations are very important cues for tonal contrasts. Two different kinds of non-modal phonations that either enhance pitch contrasts or provide an additional contrastive cue divide tonal leve...
متن کاملLinguistic Voice Quality
Contrasting phonation types in languages can differ along several acoustic dimensions, depending on whether the contrast involves differences in open quotient, in glottal closing velocity, and in noise excitation/periodicity. Listeners thus potentially have multiple perceptual cues to such contrasts. Two perception experiments, classification and similarity rating, show that listeners from diff...
متن کاملEffects of native language on perception of voice quality
Little is known about how listeners judge phonemic versus allophonic (or freely varying) versus post-lexical variations in voice quality, or about which acoustic attributes serve as perceptual cues in specific contexts. To address this issue, native speakers of Gujarati, Thai, and English discriminated among pairs of voices that differed only in the relative amplitudes of the first versus secon...
متن کاملAcoustic and electroglottographic analyses of nonpathological, nonmodal phonation.
Languages where phonation type and tone are contrastive make use of extremely fine and controlled actions of laryngeal structures; hence, there is little opportunity to variation in either phonation or pitch. Nonetheless, many American Indian languages have contrastive nonmodal phonation, which, moreover, is subject to a great deal of variation. There are a few studies addressing the phonetics ...
متن کامل