Sub - and supraglottal pressures in speech

This is a follow up of a study of Fant, Hertegård and Kruckenberg (1966). Data from simultaneous recordings of sub-and supraglottal pressures and the speech wave have been processed with the view of contributing to the theory of voice production, in specific intensity functions, and to suggest interpretations of observed gross features and fine structure of sub-and supraglottal pressure contours in connected speech. We have additional support for the view of dividing a speakers available F 0-range in a lower part and an upper part differing in the role of F 0 and subglottal pressure as determinants of voice intensity. Our studies of subglottal dynamics have involved onset and offset characteristics and declination and the influence of specific segmental structures and of focal stress. Of special interest has been to separate influences of passively induced aerodynamic variations from prosodically significant pulmonary activity. Data recording and display One of the authors, SH, served as the subject for the recording of sub-and supraglottal pressures during the reading of isolated vowels, specially composed test sentences and a paragraph from a novel. In addition, the subject performed glissando phonations of sustained vowels in which F 0 varied continuously in a range from 65 to 250 Hz. Subglottal pressure, P sub , was measured through a tracheal puncturing probe and supraglottal pressure, P sup , by means of a sond inserted through the nasal pathways. In order to optimize the size of superimposed voice ripple the P sub-and P sup-time functions were lowpass filtered at 75 Hz. Examples of P sub and P sup as additions to our standard display of oscillogram spectrogram, F 0 and intensity have appeared in some earlier publications (Fant, Hertegård and Kruckenberg 1996, Fant and Kruckenberg, 966). We now have a databank of such composite illustrations covering one paragraph of text reading. Recently, we have added data from assessments of perceived prominence of each of the 215 syllables in this corpus (Fant, Kruckenberg and Nord, 1997). Glissando phonations and isolated vowels. The purpose of these experiments was to study the covariation of F 0, P sup E e and the overall sound pressure level (SPL). E e is the amplitude of the negative peak of the differentiated glottal flow and serves as a scale factor of formant excitation. Fig. 1 shows E e and P sub as a function of F 0 from four glissando phonations differing in vocal effort …