Speaker: Pat Keating (UCLA)
Date & Time: Friday, April 8th at 3:30 pm
Place: ARTS Bldg. room 260
Title: Linguistic Voice Quality
Abstract: In this talk I will present several results concerning the production and perception of voice quality (phonation type), from a larger interdisciplinary project at UCLA. First, I compare the acoustic properties of phonation type distinctions in several languages, deriving a simple (low-dimensional) phonetic space for voice quality in which phonation types cluster across languages. Second, I discuss the relation between phonation and lexical tone. In some languages, phonation type is phonemic, and independent of tone, either because the languages are non-tonal (e.g. Gujarati), or because tones and phonation cross-classify (e.g. Mazatec, Yi languages). In other languages, phonation is non-phonemic, instead conditioned by voice pitch and segmental/prosodic contexts (e.g. English). In some such languages (e.g. Mandarin), this relation between voice pitch and voice quality gives voice quality a secondary role in tonal contrasts, increasing the effective size of the tone space. Still other tone languages have both independent phonation and pitch-related phonation (e.g. Hmongic languages); we show that in one such language, White Hmong, the perceptual role of phonation is different for different tones. These cases will be illustrated with acoustic and physiological measures of voice production, obtained with our freely-available tools for voice analysis.