Perception of Glottalization in Varying Pitch Contexts Across Languages

Glottalization is often associated with low pitch in intonation languages, but evidence from many languages indicates that this is not an obligatory association. We asked speakers of German, English and Swedish to compare glottalized stimuli with several pitch contour alternatives in an AXB listening test. Although the low F0 in the glottalized stimuli tended to be perceived as most similar to falling pitch contours, this was not always the case, indicating that pitch perception in glottalization cannot be predicted by F0 alone. We also found evidence for cross-linguistic differences in the degree of flexibility of pitch judgments in glottalized stretches of speech. Index Terms: prosody, voice quality, perception, glottalizatio

Perception of Glottalization in Varying Pitch Contexts in Mandarin Chinese

Although glottalization has often been associated with low pitch, evidence from a number of sources supports the assertion that this association is not obligatory, and is likely to be language-specific. Following a previous study testing perception of glottalization by German, English, and Swedish listeners, the current research investigates the influence of pitch context on the perception of glottalization by native speakers of a tone language, Mandarin Chinese. Listeners heard AXB sets in which they were asked to match glottalized stimuli with pitch contours. We find that Mandarin listeners tend not to be influenced by the pitch context when judging the pitch of glottalized stretches of speech. These data lend support to the idea that the perception of glottalization varies in relation to language-specific prosodic structure.casl[1] Gordon, M. & P. Ladefoged (2001). Phonation types: a crosslinguistic overview. Journalof Phonetics 29: 383-406. [2] Gerratt, B.R. & J. Kreiman (2001). Toward a taxonomy of nonmodal phonation. Journal of Phonetics 29: 365-381. [3] Catford, J.C. (1964). Phonation types: the classification of some laryngeal components of speech production. In: Abercrombie, D. et al. (eds.) In honour of Daniel Jones, London: Longmans, pp. 26-37. [4] Blomgren, M., Y. Chen, M.L. Ng, & H.R. Gilbert (1998). Acoustic, aerodynamic, physiologic, and perceptual properties of modal and vocal fry registers. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 103(5): 2649-2658. [5] Gussenhoven, C. (2004). The phonology of tone and intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [6] Pierrehumbert, J. & D. Talkin (1992). Lenition of /h/ and glottal stop. In Papers in Laboratory Phonology II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 90-117. [7] Pierrehumbert, J. (1995). Prosodic effects on glottal allophones. In: Fujimura, O., Hirano, M. (eds.), Vocal fold physiology: voice quality control. Singular Publishing Group, San Diego, pp. 39- 60. [8] Dilley, L., S. Shattuck-Hufnagel, & M. Ostendorf (1996). Glottalization of word-initial vowels as a function of prosodic structure. Journal of Phonetics 24: 423-444. [9] Redi, L. & S. Shattuck-Hufnagel (2001). Variation in the realization of glottalization in normal speakers. Journal of Phonetics 29: 407-429. [10] Henton, C. & A. Bladon (1988). Creak as a socio-phonetic marker. In Hyman, L.M. & C.N. Li (eds.) Language, Speech and Mind: studies in honor of Victoria A. Fromkin. London, pp. 3- 29. [11] Huffman, M.K. (2005). Segmental and prosodic effects on coda glottalization. Journal of Phonetics 33: 335-362. [12] Ogden, R. (2001). Turn transition, creak and glottal stop in Finnish talk-in-interaction. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 31: 139-152. [13] Ogden, R. (2004). Non-modal voice quality and turn-taking in Finnish. In Couper-Kuhlen, E & Ford, C. (eds.) Sound patterns in interaction: cross-linguistic studies from conversation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 29-62. [14] Bissiri, M. P., M.L. Lecumberri, M. Cooke & J. Vol_n, (2011). The role of word-initial glottal stops in recognizing English words. Proceedings of Interspeech 2011, Florence, Italy, pp. 165-168. [15] Kohler, K. J. (1994). Glottal stops and glottalization in German. Phonetica 51: 38-51. [16] Ding, H., O. Jokisch & R. Hoffmann (2004). Glottalization in inventory construction: a cross-language study. Proceedings of ISCSLP 2004, Hong Kong, pp. 37-40. [17] Chao, Y.R. (1968). A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. Berkeley, University of California Press. [18] Ding, H. & J. Helbig (1996). Sprecher- und kontextbedingte Varianz des dritten Vokaltones in chinesischen Silben - eine akustische Untersuchung. Proceedings of DAGA 1996, Bonn, Germany, pp. 514-515. [19] Silverman, D. (1997). Laryngeal Complexity in Otomanguean Vowels. Phonology 14: 235-261. [20] Frazier, M. (2008). The interaction of pitch and creaky voice: data from Yucatec Maya and cross-linguistic implications. UBC Working Papers in Linguistics: Proceedings of Workshop on Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas (WSCLA), pp. 112-125. [21] N_ Chasaide, A. & C. Gobl (2004). Voice quality and f0 in prosody: towards a holistic account. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Speech Prosody, Nara, Japan, pp. 189-196. [22] Bissiri, M.P. & M. Zellers (2013). Perception of glottalization in varying pitch contexts across languages. Proceedings of Interspeech 2013, Lyon, France, pp. 253-257. [23] Boersma, P. & D. Weenink (2013). Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Available http://www.praat.org/. [24] Liu, S. & A.G. Samuel (2004). Perception of Mandarin lexical tones when F0 information is neutralized. Language and Speech 47(2): 109-138. [25] Lee, C.-Y., L. Tao & Z.S. Bond (2008). Identification of acoustically modified Mandarin tones by native listeners. Journal of Phonetics 36: 537-563.pub4421pu

Perception of pitch in glottalizations of varying duration by German listeners

Previous studies have shown that glottalization is not necessarily perceived as lower pitch but that pitch perception in glottalization can be influenced by the different size of prosodic domains relevant in the native language of the listener. Speakers of intonation languages were influenced by the preceding pitch context when judging the pitch of longer creaky voice stretches, while speakers of pitch-accent or tone languages were not. The current study investigates pitch perception by German listeners in glottalized stretches of speech whose duration varied along a 10-step continuum. We found that the duration of the glottalized stretches affected the categorization of the stimuli, and that the German listeners were not influenced by the preceding pitch context, unlike in a previous study on longer stretches of glottalization of constant duration. Possibly shorter stretches of glottalization are interpreted as segmental word-boundary phenomena rather than as intonation.casl691pub3945pu

Tone and intonation: introductory notes and practical recommendations

International audienceThe present article aims to propose a simple introduction to the topics of (i) lexical tone, (ii) intonation, and (iii) tone-intonation interactions, with practical recommendations for students. It builds on the authors' observations on various languages, tonal and non-tonal; much of the evidence reviewed concerns tonal languages of Asia. With a view to providing beginners with an adequate methodological apparatus for studying tone and intonation, the present notes emphasize two salient dimensions of linguistic diversity. The first is the nature of the lexical tones: we review the classical distinction between (i) contour tones that can be analyzed into sequences of level tones, and (ii) contour tones that are non-decomposable (phonetically complex). A second dimension of diversity is the presence or absence of intonational tones: tones of intonational origin that are formally identical with lexical (and morphological) tones

Acoustic characterization of the glides /j/ and /w/ in American English

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 141-145).Acoustic analyses were conducted to identify the characteristics that differentiate the glides /j,w/ from adjacent vowels. These analyses were performed on a recorded database of intervocalic glides, produced naturally by two male and two female speakers in controlled vocalic and prosodic contexts. Glides were found to differ significantly from adjacent vowels through RMS amplitude reduction, first formant frequency reduction, open quotient increase, harmonics-to-noise ratio reduction, and fundamental frequency reduction. The acoustic data suggest that glides differ from their cognate high vowels /i,u/ in that the glides are produced with a greater degree of constriction in the vocal tract. The narrower constriction causes an increase in oral pressure, which produces aerodynamic effects on the glottal voicing source. This interaction between the vocal tract filter and its excitation source results in skewing of the glottal waveform, increasing its open quotient and decreasing the amplitude of voicing. A listening experiment with synthetic tokens was performed to isolate and compare the perceptual salience of acoustic cues to the glottal source effects of glides and to the vocal tract configuration itself. Voicing amplitude (representing source effects) and first formant frequency (representing filter configuration) were manipulated in cooperating and conflicting patterns to create percepts of /V#V/ or /V#GV/ sequences, where Vs were high vowels and Gs were their cognate glides.(cont.) In the responses of ten naïve subjects, voicing amplitude had a greater effect on the detection of glides than first formant frequency, suggesting that glottal source effects are more important to the distinction between glides and high vowels. The results of the acoustic and perceptual studies provide evidence for an articulatory-acoustic mapping defining the glide category. It is suggested that glides are differentiated from high vowels and fricatives by articulatory-acoustic boundaries related to the aerodynamic consequences of different degrees of vocal tract constriction. The supraglottal constriction target for glides is sufficiently narrow to produce a non-vocalic oral pressure drop, but not sufficiently narrow to produce a significant frication noise source. This mapping is consistent with the theory that articulator-free features are defined by aero-mechanical interactions. Implications for phonological classification systems and speech technology applications are discussed.by Elisabeth Hon Hunt.Ph.D

Classification of vocal fold vibration as regular or irregular in normal, voiced speech

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-97).Irregular phonation serves an important communicative function in human speech and occurs allophonically in American English. This thesis uses cues from both the temporal and frequency domains - such as fundamental frequency, normalized RMS amplitude, smoothed-energy-difference amplitude (a measure of abruptness in energy variations) and shift-difference amplitude (a measures of periodicity) -to classify segments of regular and irregular phonation in normal, continuous speech. Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are used to classify the tokens as examples of either regular or irregular phonation. The tokens are extracted from the TIMIT database, and are extracted from 151 different speakers. Both genders are well represented, and the tokens occur in various contexts within the utterance. The train-set uses 114 different speakers, while the test-set uses another 37 speakers. A total of 292 of 320 irregular tokens (recognition rate of 91.25% with a false alarm rate of 4.98%), and 4105 of 4320 regular tokens (recognition rate of 95.02% with a false alarm rate of 8.75%) are correctly identified.(cont.) The high recognition rates are an indicator that the set of acoustic cues are robust in accurately identifying a token as regular or irregular, even in cases where one or two acoustic cues show unexpected values. Also, analysis of irregular tokens in the training set (1331 irregular tokens) shows that 78% occur at word boundaries and 5% occur at syllable boundaries. Of the irregular tokens at syllable boundaries, 72% are either at the junction of a compound-word (e.g "outcast;") or at the junction of a base word and a suffix. Of the irregular tokens which do not occur at word or syllable boundaries, 70% occur adjacent to voiceless consonants mostly in utterance-final location. These observations support irregular phonation as a cue for syntactic boundaries in connected speech, and combined with the robust classification results to separate regular phonation from irregular phonation, could be used to improve speech recognition and lexical access models.by Kushan Krishna Surana.M.Eng

Challenges in analysis and processing of spontaneous speech

Selected and peer-reviewed papers of the workshop entitled Challenges in Analysis and Processing of Spontaneous Speech (Budapest, 2017

Speech Communication

Contains table of contents for Part V, table of contents for Section 1, reports on six research projects and a list of publications.C.J. Lebel FellowshipDennis Klatt Memorial FundNational Institutes of Health Grant R01-DC00075National Institutes of Health Grant R01-DC01291National Institutes of Health Grant R01-DC01925National Institutes of Health Grant R01-DC02125National Institutes of Health Grant R01-DC02978National Institutes of Health Grant R01-DC03007National Institutes of Health Grant R29-DC02525National Institutes of Health Grant F32-DC00194National Institutes of Health Grant F32-DC00205National Institutes of Health Grant T32-DC00038National Science Foundation Grant IRI 89-05249National Science Foundation Grant IRI 93-14967National Science Foundation Grant INT 94-2114