A model of acoustic coupling between the oral and subglottal cavities is developed and predicts attenuation of and discontinuities in vowel formant prominence near resonances of the subglottal system. One discontinuity occurs near the second subglottal resonance (SubF2), at 1300-1600 Hz, suggesting the hypothesis that this is a quantal effect [K. N. Stevens, J. Phonetics 17, 3-46 (1989)] dividing speakers' front and back vowels. Recordings of English vowels (in /hVd/ environments) for three male and three female speakers were made, while an accelerometer attached to the neck area was used to capture the subglottal waveform. Average speaker SubF2 values range from 1280 to 1620 Hz, in agreement with prior work. Attenuation of 5-12 dB of second formant prominence near SubF2 is found to occur in all back-front diphthongs analyzed, while discontinuities in the range of 50-300 Hz often occur, in good agreement with the resonator model. These coupling effects are found to be generally stronger for open-phase than for closed-phase measurements. The implications for a quantal relation between coupling effects near SubF2 and [back] are discussed.
A model of acoustic coupling between the oral and subglottal cavities predicts discontinuities in vowel formant prominences near resonances of the subglottal system. One discontinuity occurs near 1300–1500 Hz, suggesting the hypothesis that this is a quantal effect [K. N. Stevens, J. Phonetics 17, 3–46 (1989)] dividing speakers’ front and back vowels. Recordings of English vowels (in /hVd/ environments) for several male and female speakers were made, while an accelerometer attached to the neck area was used to capture the subglottal waveform. Statistics on our subglottal resonance measurements are given and compared with prior work. Qualitative agreement is shown between the resonator model and diphthong data with time-varying F2 for several speakers. Comparison of the second vowel formant and second subglottal formant tracks across all speakers, analysis of the formant spaces spanned by each speaker’s vowel data, and a survey of vowel formant data for a sample of the world’s languages support the possibility that a speaker’s second subglottal resonance divides front and back vowels. Possible implications for theories of vowel inventory structure [e.g., J. Lijencrants and B. Lindblom, Language 48, 839–862 (1972)] are discussed. [Work supported by NIH Grant DC00075.]
This study investigates the manual labeling of speech, and in particular conversational speech, at the articulatory feature level. A detailed transcription, including subtleties such as overlapping or reduced gestures, is useful for studying the great pronunciation variability in conversational speech. This type of labeling also facilitates the testing of automatic feature classifiers, such as those used in articulatory approaches to automatic speech recognition. For this study, approximately 100 utterances drawn from the switchboard database have been transcribed using eight articulatory tiers rather than the traditional single phonetic tier. The tiers include: place and degree for up to two constrictions, nasality, glottal state, lip rounding, and vowel quality. Two transcribers have labeled this set of utterances in a multipass strategy, allowing for correction of errors. Preliminary analysis shows a high degree of intertranscriber agreement. Further analysis of the data is being performed to address a number of questions, such as: How quickly and reliably can this type of transcription be done? What are its advantages and disadvantages relative to purely phone-based transcription? What characteristics of the utterances correspond to high or low transcriber agreement? What can be learned from the data regarding articulatory phenomena such as reduction and asynchrony?
A model of acoustic coupling between the oral and subglottal cavities is described, which predicts attenuation of vowel formant prominences and discontinuities in formant trajectories near resonances of the subglottal system. The hypothesis that these effects on F2 near the second subglottal resonance (SubF2) are quantal effects for the feature [back] is examined using acoustic and subglottal data from English-speaking adults. Experimental studies of F2 and SubF2 in English vowel production [Chi and Sonderegger, JASA 122, 1735–1745 (2007)] are reviewed and show that attenuation of second formant prominence and discontinuities in F2 trajectories near SubF2 consistently occur in back-front diphthongs, in accordance with the acoustic model, while for monophthongs front and back vowel F2 values pattern above and below SubF2, as expected under the quantal hypothesis. An additional analysis of the data is presented, showing that breathiness, attenuation, and discontinuity are positively correlated across back-front diphthongs, as predicted by the acoustic model. Lastly, a cross-linguistic survey of F2 data from 45 languages from the literature is presented, showing the cross-linguistic plausibility of the hypothesis that [+back] and [−back] vowel F2 values are separated by SubF2.
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