Voice quality and tone identification in White Hmong

Abstract

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.

Comparing Measures of Voice Quality From Sustained Phonation and Continuous Speech

“…1 The source spectrum was then smoothed by fitting it with a four-piece model whose segments ranged from the first to the second harmonic (H1-H2), from H2 to the harmonic nearest 2 kHz (H2-2 kHz), from the harmonic nearest 2 kHz to that nearest 5 kHz (2-5 kHz), and from H2 to the harmonic nearest 5 kHz (H2-5 kHz). These segments were chosen because they capture most of the variability in source spectral shapes (Kreiman, Gerratt, & Antoñanzas-Barroso, 2007a), their individual perceptual importance has been established (Garellek, Keating, Esposito, & Kreiman, 2013;Kreiman & Garellek, 2011), and in combination, they appear to form an adequate psychoacoustic model of source contributions to voice quality (Garellek, Samlan, Gerratt, & Kreiman, 2016;Kreiman, Garellek, Chen, Alwan, & Gerratt, 2015;Kreiman, Gerratt, Garellek, Samlan, & Zhang, 2014). These measures were thus preferred to others found in the literature (jitter, shimmer, etc.)…”

Covariation between voice quality and pitch: Revisiting the case of Mandarin creaky voice

“…For example, similar to Mandarin, creaky voice is also often accompanied by tone 6 in Cantonese (Yu and Lam, 2014); mid-laryngealization/creaky voice is an important cue for several tones in Northern Vietnamese (Brunelle, 2009); and breathy voice co-occurs with White Hmong high-falling tone (Esposito, 2012;Garellek et al, 2013) and Green Mong mid-falling tone (Andruski and Ratliff, 2000). When phonation covaries with tones, the situation is trickier because the interaction between the non-modal phonation and pitch is less clear.…”

Online processing of tone and intonation in Mandarin: Evidence from ERPs

“…At the sentential level, F0 is also used to convey post-lexical information, for example, intonation types (e.g., question intonation, statement intonation) (Ladd, 2008). Although other acoustic correlates (such as duration, intensity and phonation) have also been shown to contribute to cue tonal and intonational contrasts (Garellek et al, 2013;Hu, 1987;Shi, 1980;Xu, 2009;Yu and Lam, 2014), F0 has been identified as the primary acoustic correlate of both tone and intonation in Mandarin (Ho, 1977;Shen, 1985;Wu, 1982;Xu and Wang, 2001;Xu, 2004). It may therefore not be surprising that tone and intonation interact with each other both in production and perception.…”