Doctoral Dissertation Research: Energy measures in the stop VOICING contrast

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

This dissertation research seeks to better understand how listening is informed by the act of moving our vocal apparatus as well as the acoustic and perceptual implications of crosslinguistic articulatory differences. A number of factors are known to contribute to our ability to make use of the acoustic signal such as articulatory strength, trading relations, and acoustic energy in contrasts. The fundamental theoretical question addressed here is whether articulation per se has direct implications for abstract gestures as distinctive features. The project builds on earlier work investigating the role of energy characteristics. Acoustic data will be collected for a range of native speakers of such typologically distinct languages as English, Dutch, German and French. Tongue position and air pressure data for plosive sounds at the beginning and end of a syllable will be synchronized with the acoustic recordings. A comprehensive data set for these languages will be used to, first, establish percepts and the boundary conditions within which a perception study will be conducted, and, second, increase our understanding of the articulation-acoustic relation across the speech chain. The relative spectral energy levels in lower harmonics will be measured and evaluated, along with their changing characteristics as a speaker makes a vowel after or before one of these consonants. These spectral energy change characteristics have been found to be more correlated with voicing contrasts than the traditional measures of voice onset time, vowel length, frequency changes, etc. across contexts and across language types. Information gained from the acoustic and articulatory data collection will be used to generate tokens to be tested in a subsequent set of perception experiments. The work has implications for automatic speech recognition technology.