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

Phonon Coherence and New Set of Sidebands in Phonon-Assisted Photoluminescence

We investigate excitonic polaron states comprising a local exciton and phonons in the longitudinal optical (LO) mode by solving the Schr\"{o}dinger equation. We derive an exact expression for the ground state (GS), which includes multi-phonon components with coefficients satisfying the Huang-Rhys factors. The recombination of GS and excited polaron states gives one set of sidebands in photoluminescence (PL): the multi-phonon components in the GS produce the Stokes lines and the zero-phonon components in the excited states produce the anti-Stokes lines. By introducing the mixing of the LO mode and environal phonon modes, the exciton will also couple with the latter, and the resultant polaron states result in another set of phonon sidebands. This set has a zero-phonon line higher and wider than that of the first set due to the tremendous number of the environal modes. The energy spacing between the zero-phonon lines of the first and second sets is proved to be the binding energy of the GS state. The common exciton origin of these two sets can be further verified by a characteristic Fano lineshape induced by the coherence in the mixing of the LO and the environal modes.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures 1 figure (fig. 1) replaced 1 figure (fig. 2) remove

Magnetotunneling Spectroscopy of Dilute Ga(AsN) Quantum Wells

We use magnetotunneling spectroscopy to explore the admixing of the extended GaAs conduction band states with the localized N-impurity states in dilute GaAs1−yNy quantum wells. In our resonant tunneling diodes, electrons can tunnel into the N-induced E− and E+ subbands in a GaAs1−yNy quantum well layer, leading to resonant peaks in the current-voltage characteristics. By varying the magnetic field applied perpendicular to the current direction, we can tune an electron to tunnel into a given k state of the well; since the applied voltage tunes the energy, we can map out the form of the energy-momentum dispersion curves of E− and E+. The data reveal that for a small N content (∼0.1%) the E− and E+ subbands are highly nonparabolic and that the heavy effective mass E+ states have a significant Γ-conduction band character even at k=0