Palato-lingual contact patterns during voiced and unvoiced consonant production

Abstract

The timing of the initiation and cessation of vocal fold vibrations characterizes the voiced and unvoiced stops. The results of perceptual experiments, however, have revealed that other cues, such as the duration of preceding vowels, the patterns of the formant transitions in the following vowels, and the period of stop closures, may play important roles in differentiating these cognates. Therefore, the present study is to further investigate the role of the tongue articulatory movements during voiced and unvoiced consonant production in Japanese. Three normal Japanese speakers served as the subjects. The palato-lingual contact patterns during intervocalic consonant productions were recorded using dynamic electropalatography. The results show that the area and duration of the palato-lingual contact are clearly larger and longer during voiceless stop productions than those during voiced cognate productions. As for fricative consonant productions, the opening of apical area during voiceless fricative production is wide and stable, while the pattern of maximal contact area is unstable. In addition, those subjects were further requested to produce same utterance lists in whispered speech. The results also supported these findings despite the lack of normal vocal fold vibrations.

Acoustical and perceptual analysis of the voicing distinction in Dutch initial plosives: the role of prevoicing

“…Duration of the burst: Slis and Cohen (1969) reported that the noise burst duration of Dutch plosives was on average 15 ms shorter for voiced plosives than for voiceless plosives. The difference in burst duration may be explained by the spatially more extended contact at constriction for voiceless plosives in comparison to voiced plosives (e.g., Cho & Ladefoged, 1999;Yoshioka, Murase, & Uematsu, 1996). Ernestus (2000) measured burst durations of 649 Dutch plosives in medial position and showed that expert listeners tended to classify plosives with short bursts durations as voiced and plosives with long burst durations as voiceless.…”

“…Power of the burst above 500 Hz: Slis and Cohen (1969) found that the amplitude of the voiceless noise burst was about 50% higher than the amplitude of the voiced noise burst. Possible causes for this difference mentioned in the literature are higher oral pressure behind the constriction and/or spatially more extended closure for voiceless plosives (e.g., Yoshioka et al, 1996). The burst (as described under 2) was first high-pass filtered at a cutoff frequency of 500 Hz.…”

Aerodynamic Characteristics of Whispered and Normal Speech during Reading Paragraph Tasks

“…, 자음산출 시 조음 기관의 운동역학적 측면 (Yoshioka et al, 1996;Higashikawa et al, 2003), 음도나 말소리에 대한 지각 (Higashikawa et al, 1996;Ito et al, 2005;Vestergaard et al, 2007), 혹은 성대의 해부생리적 특성 (Rubin et al, 2006;Sundberg et al, 2010…”