Voice

About: Voice is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2393 publications have been published within this topic receiving 56637 citations.

Boundary phenomena and variability in Japanese high vowel devoicing

Abstract: Devoicing of high vowels (HVD) in Tokyo Japanese applies in two environments—between voiceless consonants, and between a voiceless consonant and a “pause”—and applies variably as a function of a number of factors. The role and definition of “pause” in this process, in terms of a physical pause or prosodic position (word or phrase boundary), remains unclear, as does what is expected when these environments overlap, and why HVD appears to be categorical in some environments and variable in others. This paper addresses three outstanding issues about HVD—the role of “boundary phenomena” (prosodic position and physical pauses), the relationship between the two environments, and the sources of variability in HVD—by examining vowel devoicing in a large corpus of spontaneous Japanese. We use mixed-effects logistic regression to model how boundary phenomena affect the likelihood of devoicing and modulate the effects of other variables, controlling for other major factors, including a measure of gestural overlap. The results suggest that all boundary phenomena jointly affect devoicing rate, and that prosodic phrase boundaries play a key role: variability in HVD looks qualitatively different for phrase-internal and phrase-final vowels, which are affected differently by word frequency, speech rate, and pause duration. We argue the results support an account of HVD as the result of two overlapping vowel devoicing processes, each widely-attested cross-linguistically: devoicing between voiceless consonants, and devoicing before prosodic phrase boundaries. Variability in the application of these two processes can then be partially explained in terms of aspects of phonetic implementation and processing: gestural overlap (Beckman 1996), which often plays a role in reduction processes, and the locality of production planning (Wagner 2012), a recent explanation for variability in the application of external sandhi processes.

Multidimensional analyses of voicing offsets and onsets in female speakers.

Abstract: This study investigates cross-speaker differences in the factors that predict voicing thresholds during abduction–adduction gestures in six normal women. Measures of baseline airflow, pulse amplitude, subglottal pressure, and fundamental frequency were made at voicing offset and onset during intervocalic /h/, produced in varying vowel environments and at different loudness levels, and subjected to relational analyses to determine which factors were most strongly related to the timing of voicing cessation or initiation. The data indicate that (a) all speakers showed differences between voicing offsets and onsets, but the degree of this effect varied across speakers; (b) loudness and vowel environment have speaker-specific effects on the likelihood of devoicing during /h/; and (c) baseline flow measures significantly predicted times of voicing offset and onset in all participants, but other variables contributing to voice timing differed across speakers. Overall, the results suggest that individual speakers have unique methods of achieving phonatory goals during running speech. These data contribute to the literature on individual differences in laryngeal function, and serve as a means of evaluating how well laryngeal models can reproduce the range of voicing behavior used by speakers during running speech tasks.