Phonation and voice quality

One of the most intriguing aspects of phonetic science is the number of distinguishable layers within the speech signal. Within even a single segment, such as a vowel, speakers control vowel quality, duration, F0, speech style, and so forth. Listeners, in turn, have learned to pay attention to these different acoustic layers in order to extract meaningful information from the speech signal. Phonation type is one of these important layers. There has been significant progress in our understanding of phonation and voice quality over the past twenty years. This is attributable both to increased interest in speech prosody at lexical and higher level domains and to recent advances in the articulatory and acoustic analysis of voice quality. At the word level, languages may use phonation type to mark meaningful lexical-phonological contrasts (see Gordon and Ladefoged (2001); Edmondson and Esling (2006); DiCanio (2009); Esposito (2010); Garellek and Keating (2011), among others). At higher levels, phonation type may be used to delimit prosodic phrases (see Pierrehumbert and Talkin (1992); Huffman (2005); Garellek (2015), among others). The papers within this session not only highlight the lexical-phonological and prosodic uses of phonation, but also demonstrate novel techniques that are being used to explore its production and perception.