Tone Distribution and Its Effect on Subglottal Pressure during Speech

The current work is part of a project to characterize the subglottal pressure (Ps) contour associated with a spoken utterance in terms of the distribution of pitch accents and of phrase and boundary tones. It is found that the nuclear pitch accent does not define the start of the termination phase; the utterance offset is a better marker. Declination rate of the working phase and its relation to the phrase and boundary tones at utterance offset are found to vary among speakers. The results have implications for models of speech production, and for applications such as computer speech synthesis and recognition.