The effects of linguistic experience on the perception of phonation

Esposito, Christina M.

doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2010.02.002

Cited by 70 publications

(86 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…H1-H2 and H2-H4) can independently cue breathiness. This result is consistent with previous work showing that various acoustic measures correlate with production and perception of linguistic breathiness (Esposito, 2010a), and with variation in the slopes of H1-H2 and H2-H4 across individual English voices (Kreiman et al, 2011). What is surprising here is that the perceptual effect of one parameter may undo the effect of the other.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

“…The interaction between H1-H2, H2-H4, and noise should therefore be studied in more detail. The linguistics literature has typically focused on harmonic attributes of breathiness (e.g., Fischer-Jïrgensen, 1967;Bickley, 1982;Esposito, 2010a), whereas the voice literature usually focuses on the role of noise (e.g., Hillenbrand et al, 1994;Shrivastav and Sapienza, 2006). The results of this study reinforce that both the harmonic and inharmonic components of the voice source, as well as their interaction, must be important in the perception of phonation, and thus that context is important in the interpretation of acoustic cues to voice quality (Kreiman and Gerratt, 2012).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Esposito, 2010a). H1*-H2*, H1*-A1*, 1 and harmonics-tonoise ratio below 500 Hz (HNR) were used to analyze the tokens' voice quality, because these measures have been shown to distinguish modal phonation from both breathy and creaky phonation types in White Hmong (Garellek, 2012).…”

Section: Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

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Voice quality and tone identification in White Hmong

Garellek

Keating

Esposito

et al. 2013

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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This study investigates the importance of source spectrum slopes in the perception of phonation by White Hmong listeners. In White Hmong, nonmodal phonation (breathy or creaky voice) accompanies certain lexical tones, but its importance in tonal contrasts is unclear. In this study, native listeners participated in two perceptual tasks, in which they were asked to identify the word they heard. In the first task, participants heard natural stimuli with manipulated F0 and duration (phonation unchanged). Results indicate that phonation is important in identifying the breathy tone, but not the creaky tone. Thus, breathiness can be viewed as contrastive in White Hmong. Next, to understand which parts of the source spectrum listeners use to perceive contrastive breathy phonation, source spectrum slopes were manipulated in the second task to create stimuli ranging from modal to breathy sounding, with F0 held constant. Results indicate that changes in H1-H2 (difference in amplitude between the first and second harmonics) and H2-H4 (difference in amplitude between the second and fourth harmonics) are independently important for distinguishing breathy from modal phonation, consistent with the view that the percept of breathiness is influenced by a steep drop in harmonic energy in the lower frequencies.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Voice quality and tone identification in White Hmong

Garellek

Keating

Esposito

et al. 2013

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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“…Registers with breathiness, or high OQ, are best distinguished from the others with mid-band spectral slope measures and changes in spectral slope. These findings are in agreement with Blankenship (2002) and Esposito (2006) who found that H1-H2 was a poor discriminator of the modal and breathy registers in Chong. The results of a LDA reveal that H1-A3 and H1-A2 better discriminate among all registers in the language, including breathy-modal and modal registers.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

The phonetics of register in Takhian Thong Chong

DiCanio¹

2009

Journal of the International Phonetic Association

102

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The Chong language uses a combination of different acoustic correlates to distinguish among its four contrastive registers (phonation types). Electroglottographic (EGG) and acoustic data were examined from original fieldwork on the Takhian Thong dialect. EGG data shows high open quotient (OQ) values for the breathy register, low OQ values for the tense register, intermediate OQ values for the modal register, and rapidly changing high to low OQ values for the breathy-tense register. Acoustic correlates indicate that H1-A3 best distinguishes between breathy and non-breathy phonation, but measures like H1-H2 and pitch are necessary to discriminate between tense and non-tense phonation. A comparison of spectral tilt and OQ measures shows the greatest correlation between OQ and H1-H2, suggesting that changes in the relative amplitude of frequencies in the upper spectrum are not directly related to changes in the open period of the glottal cycle. OQ is best correlated with changes in the degree of glottal tension.

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“…The variety of acoustic measures employed have become common in recent phonetic literature regarding voice quality (e.g. Esposito 2006, Khan 2012, Berkson 2013, Kirby 2014. These measures are generally of two types; (i) those which take the spectral profile of a vowel and look at aspects of it which are thought to be indicative of the glottal source vibration (spectral slope, SHR) and (ii) those which measure the amount of noise generated at the glottis (HNR, SHR).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An acoustic analysis of tone and register in Louma Oeshi

Lew

Gruber

2016

Proc Ling Soc Amer

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Abstract. This study describes the acoustic properties associated with tone and register in Louma Oeshi, a previously unstudied Akoid language of Laos. Louma Oeshi uses three tones (High, Mid, and Low) which overlap with a tense/lax register distinction to yield a six-way suprasegmental contrast. In this paper, we (1) offer a first account of the pitch and voice quality characteristics associated with each Tone-Register pair, (2) examine further the variability in glottalization strategies signaling the constricted register, and (3) explore the influence of contrastive voice quality on pitch and vice versa, particularly as a predictor of the variation in glottalization.Keywords. tone; register; voice quality; Tibeto-Burman; Louma; Oeshi 1. Introduction. This study describes the acoustic properties associated with tone and register in Louma Oeshi (henceforth Oeshi), a previously unstudied Akoid/Hanoid language in Laos, belonging to the Southern Lolo/Ngwi subgroup of Tibeto-Burman. Like other Southern Ngwi languages, Oeshi phonology employs three tone levels (High, Mid, and Low) and an overlapping a tense/lax register distinction. In the case of Oeshi, tone and register are fully intersective such that they combine to yield a six-way suprasegmental contrast. In recent decades, the phonetic literature has shown that the boundary between what have traditionally been known as "tone" and "register" languages is often quite blurred, particularly in languages of mainland Southeast Asia (Abramson & Luangthongkum, 2009). How a mixed tone-register prosodic system weighs or emphasizes its multiple contrasts has become an issue of great interest to both phoneticians and phonologists (Silverman 1997 The complete intersection of tone and register levels in Oeshi (Lax and Tense register co-occur with each Low, Mid and High tone) indicates that the qualities are phonologically independent in the sense of Kuang (2013), but raises questions about their phonetic interaction. In addition to providing a first account of Oeshi tonal phonetics, this paper explores how voice quality settings affect pitch across the tone-register combinations, and vice versa. The preliminary data presented here suggests that pitch and voice quality are mostly independent in their phonetic production as well. That is, Oeshi speakers manipulate pitch or voice quality characteristics without great influence on the other property. There is, however, a substantial exception to this observation --High Tense tone-register words, which are noteworthy for a variety of reasons.The paper proceeds as follows. We first describe the relationship of Oeshi to other regional languages with similar, but importantly different, complex tone-register systems ( §2). After explaining our experimental methods and analytic techniques ( §3), we provide the findings ( §4) for the two most successful acoustic correlates of the six-way prosodic contrasts: F0, the fundamental frequency of the acoustic signal (tone) and *H1-H2, the

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The effects of linguistic experience on the perception of phonation

Cited by 70 publications

References 19 publications

Voice quality and tone identification in White Hmong

Voice quality and tone identification in White Hmong

The phonetics of register in Takhian Thong Chong

An acoustic analysis of tone and register in Louma Oeshi

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