The P* reading group will be meeting again this Monday, 25 March at 15:30 in room 002 (and on Zoom, at the following link). This week, Jeanne will be leading discussion on Claudia Duarte-Borquez, Maxine Van Doren and Marc Garellek’s 2024 paper Utterance-Final Voice Quality in American English and Mexican Spanish Bilinguals. Below is the abstract:
We investigate utterance-final voice quality in bilinguals of English and Spanish, two languages which differ in the type of non-modal voice usually encountered at ends of utterances: American English often has phrase-final creak, whereas in Mexican Spanish, phrase-final voiced sounds are breathy or even devoiced. Twenty-one bilinguals from the San Diego-Tijuana border region were recorded (with electroglottography and audio) reading passages in English and Spanish. Ends of utterances were coded for their visual voice quality as “modal” (having no aspiration noise or voicing irregularity), “breathy” (having aspiration noise), “creaky” (having voicing irregularity), or “breathy-creaky” (having both aspiration noise and voicing irregularity). In utterance-final position, speakers showed more frequent use of both modal and creaky voice when speaking in English, and more frequent use of breathy and breathy-creaky voice when speaking in Spanish. We find no role of language dominance on the rates of these four voice qualities. The electroglottographic and acoustic analyses show that all voice qualities, even utterance-final creak, are produced with increased glottal spreading; the combination of distinct noise measures and amplitude of voicing can distinguish breathy, creaky, and breathy-creaky voice qualities from one another, and from modal voice.
The paper is attached (and also available on the Google Drive). The full schedule for the semester is available here.