An experiment has been performed to assess to what degree laryngeal muscle activity and subglottal air pressure affect the rate of vocal cord vibration in speech. Attention has been limited to those changes in the rate of vocal cord vibration that are associated with the physiological implementation of prosodic phenomena such as intonation and prominence. Subglottal air pressure was measured directly through a catheter inserted between the cricoid and thyroid cartilages. Using hooked-wire electrodes, the electromyographic activity was recorded in the right- and left-side cricothyroid muscle and in the sternohyoid, sternothyroid, and thyrohyoid muscles. The data were collected for one subject, a native speaker of Dutch. The results of the experiment show that, in this particular speaker, (1) cricothyroid muscle activity bears the most direct relationship to all major F0 changes, in that the contraction of this muscle raises F0 while its relaxation has an F0 lowering effect: (2) subglottal air pressure controls the gradually falling base line of the F0 contour and gives support to a rapid F0 drop if it occurs on the utterance-final syllable; and (3) the sternohyoid, sternothyroid, and thyrohyoid muscles have no direct effect on F0. Subject Classification: 70.20, 70.70.

Declination is taken as the focus of studying pitch phenomena from an acoustic, physiological and perceptual point of view. It is shown that originally declination was no more than a theoretical construct to account for the interpretation of acoustic F₀ recordings. Recently, psycholinguistic considerations have enhanced the domain of application so as to account for this phenomenon. The literature is reviewed and the authors take issue over the various claims put forward by others, such as the dominance of the topline over the baseline approach, and the amount of pre-programming involved in declination, as manifested in its slope and in linguistically determined resetting.

From previous research we know that prosodic features are perceptually effective in marking boundaries and that a suitable implementation of these features improves the quality of synthetic speech in terms of acceptability. It can further be assumed that listeners use the perceived prosodic information to compute the meaning of the input speech. This paper, therefore, investigates and determines whether a well-phrased utterance, (that is, an utterance with prosodic boundaries in appropriate positions and with appropriate realizations), is easier to comprehend than a poorly-phrased one. To measure this, we designed a method in which a kind of verification task is combined with a question-answering task (“monitoring for the answer”). The stimulus set consisted of structurally ambiguous sentences. The expectation was that when listeners hear a question followed by an appropriately phrased utterance, they will react more rapidly than when the question is followed by an utterance with neutral phrasing. Also, it was expected that in the latter situation reaction times (RTs) will be shorter than if an inappropriately phrased utterance is presented. The results confirmed the expectations: an appropriately phrased utterance always produced the fastest RTs.

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