Physiological correlates of intonation patterns

Abstract

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.

Development of a Double-Membrane Sound Generator for Application in a Voice-Producing Element for Laryngectomized Patients

“…24 A frequency variation of about 7 semitones (%50%) is used for intonation during normal phonation. 3,13 Besides the low pitch of the TE voice, for some laryngectomized patients another problem in voice rehabilitation is the low tonicity of the pharyngoesophageal segment, which results in a breathy TE voice of poor quality. 2,17 To improve voice quality in female laryngectomized patients and in patients with a hypotonic or atonic pharyngo-esophageal segment, recently several soundgenerating prosthetic prototypes have been developed.…”

F0 declination in English and Mandarin Broadcast News Speech

“…It was found that declination was expected and used for normalization by listeners, i.e., when two stressed syllables sounded equal in pitch, the second was actually lower [3]. The physiological causes for F 0 declination include the tracheal pull [4], the downtrend of subglottal pressure [5,6], and the activity of laryngeal muscles [7]. It has been unclear, however, whether declination is part of the linguistic code and speaker-controlled, or an automatic byproduct of some physiological process [2,8].…”

Electromyographic study of focus and accent in Japanese.

“…Lastly, we would like to note that our interpretation of the SH reduction phenomena is partly in contradiction with the two extreme views about the SH muscle: the view that sees straightforward causal relationship between SH activity and F0 lowering (Sugito, 1982) and the view that sees virtually no role played by the SH regarding F0 lowering (Collier, 1975;Fujisaki, 1988).…”

“…The effect of NP location on F0 estimation implies that the efficiency of the CT activity is higher in earlier portion of an utterance than in later portion, and suggests the possible relevance of the subglottal pressure change. As mentioned briefly in Collier (1975), the CT activity can increase in order to compensate lowered subglottal pressure, which is observed typically in the realization of the sentence final rising rendition. If this kind of compensation exists throughout the sentence as a function of gradually decreasing subglottal pressure, the underestimation in the first noun phrase and the overestimation in the second one can be interpreted as a natural byproduct of the fact that we used one single regression formula to derive the estimated F0' value regardless of the phrase location.…”

“…Also, F0' tends to diverge from F0 at the end of an utterance. This is presumably because of the sudden decrease of the subglottal pressure, which often marks the end of an utterance (Collier, 1975).…”