Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T00:20:29.308Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The acoustic consequences of phonation and tone interactions in Jalapa Mazatec

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 July 2011

Marc Garellek  and
Patricia Keating
Marc Garellek
Affiliation:
Phonetics Laboratory, Department of Linguistics, [email protected]
Patricia Keating
Affiliation:
Phonetics Laboratory, Department of Linguistics, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

San Felipe Jalapa de Díaz (Jalapa) Mazatec is unusual in possessing a three-way phonation contrast and three-way level tone contrast independent of phonation. This study investigates the acoustics of how phonation and tone interact in this language, and how such interactions are maintained across variables like speaker sex, vowel timecourse, and presence of aspiration in the onset. Using a large number of words from the recordings of Mazatec made by Paul Kirk and Peter Ladefoged in the 1980s and 1990s, the results of our acoustic and statistical analysis support the claim that spectral measures like H1-H2 and mid-range spectral measures like H1-A2 best distinguish each phonation type, though other measures like Cepstral Peak Prominence are important as well. This is true regardless of tone and speaker sex. The phonation type contrasts are strongest in the first third of the vowel and then weaken towards the end. Although the tone categories remain distinct from one another in terms of F0 throughout the vowel, for laryngealized phonation the tone contrast in F0 is partially lost in the initial third. Consistent with phonological work on languages that cross-classify tone and phonation type (i.e. ‘laryngeally complex’ languages, Silverman 1997), this study shows that the complex orthogonal three-way phonation and tone contrasts do remain acoustically distinct according to the measures studied, despite partial neutralizations in any given measure.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the International Phonetic Association , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , August 2011 , pp. 185 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © International Phonetic Association 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Andersen, Torben. 1993. Vowel quality alternation in Dinka verb inflection. Phonology 10, 1–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andruski, Jean E. 2006. Tone clarity in mixed pitch/phonation-type tones. Journal of Phonetics 34, 388–404.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andruski, Jean E. & Ratliff, Martha. 2000. Phonation types in production of phonological tone: The case of Green Mong. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 30 (1/2), 37–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Avelino, Heriberto. 2010. Acoustic and electroglottographic analyses of nonpathological, nonmodal phonation. Journal of Voice 24 (3), 270–280.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Baayen, R. Harald, Davidson, Douglas J. & Bates, Douglas M.. 2008. Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language 59, 390–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baken, Ronald J. & Orlikoff, Robert F.. 2000. Clinical measurement of speech and voice. San Diego, CA: Singular.Google Scholar
Bickley, Corine. 1982. Acoustic analysis and perception of breathy vowels. MIT Speech Communication Working Papers 1, 73–83.Google Scholar
Blankenship, Barbara. 1997. The time course of breathiness and laryngealization in vowels. Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA.Google Scholar
Blankenship, Barbara. 2002. The timing of nonmodal phonation in vowels. Journal of Phonetics 30, 163–191.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Belotel-Grenié, Agnès & Grenié, Michel. 2004. The creaky voice phonation and the organization of Chinese discourse. International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages: With Emphasis on Tone Languages, 5–8. Bejing: ISCA.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David. 2008. Praat: Doing phonetics by computer. www.praat.org (3 December 2009).Google Scholar
Cho, Taehong, Jun, Sun-Ah & Ladefoged, Peter. 2002. Acoustic and aerodynamic correlates of Korean stops and fricatives. Journal of Phonetics 30, 193–228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davison, Deborah S. 1991. An acoustic study of so-called creaky voice in Tianjin Mandarin. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 78, 50–57.Google Scholar
de Krom, Guus. 1993. A cepstrum-based technique for determining a harmonics-to-noise ratio in speech signals. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 36, 254–266.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
DiCanio, Christian T. 2009. The phonetics of register in Takhian Thong Chong. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 39 (2), 162–188.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edmondson, Jerold A. 1997. Voice qualities and inverse filtering in Chong. Mon-Khmer Studies 26, 107–116.Google Scholar
Edmondson, Jerold A. & Esling, John H.. 2006. The valves of the throat and their functioning in tone, vocal register, and stress: Laryngoscopic case studies. Phonology 23 (2), 157–191.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epstein, Melissa. 2002. Voice quality and prosody in English. Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA.Google Scholar
Esposito, Christina M. 2004. Santa Ana del Valle Zapotec phonation. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 103, 71–105.Google Scholar
Esposito, Christina M. 2005. An acoustic and electroglottographic study of phonation in Santa Ana del Valle Zapotec. Poster presented at the 79th Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, San Francisco, CA.Google Scholar
Esposito, Christina M. 2006. The effects of linguistic experience on the perception of phonation. Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA.Google Scholar
Esposito, Christina M. 2010a. The effects of linguistic experience on the perception of phonation. Journal of Phonetics 38, 306–316.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Esposito, Christina M. 2010b. Variation in contrastive phonation in Santa Ana del Valle Zapotec. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 40, 181–198.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Esposito, Christina M. & Khan, Sameer ud Dowla. 2010. Contrastive breathiness on consonants and vowels. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 128, 2476.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fant, Gunnar, Liljencrants, Johan & Lin, Qi-guang. 1985. A four-parameter model of glottal flow. STL-QPSR 4, 1–13.Google Scholar
Fischer-Jørgensen, Eli. 1967. Phonetic analysis of breathy (murmured) vowels in Gujarati. Indian Linguistics 28, 71–139.Google Scholar
Fulop, Sean A. & Golston, Chris. 2008. Breathy and whispery voicing in White Hmong. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 4, 060006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garellek, Marc. 2010. The acoustics of coarticulated non-modal phonation. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 108, 66–112.Google Scholar
Gerfen, Chip & Baker, Kirk. 2005. The production and perception of laryngealized vowels in Coatzospan Mixtec. Journal of Phonetics 33, 311–334.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gobl, Christer & Chasaide, Ailbhe Ní. 1999. Voice source variation in the vowel as a function of consonantal context. In Hardcastle, William J. & Hewlett, Nigel (eds.), Coarticulation: Theory, data and techniques, 122–143. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, Matthew & Ladefoged, Peter. 2001. Phonation types: A cross-linguistic overview. Journal of Phonetics 29, 383–406.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gordon, Raymond Jr. (ed.). 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the world, 15th edn. Dallas, TX: SIL International. http://www.ethnologue.com/15/web.asp (July 2009).Google Scholar
Hanson, Helen M. 1995. Glottal characteristics of female speakers. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Hanson, Helen M. 1997. Glottal characteristics of female speakers: Acoustic correlates. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 101 (1), 466–481.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hanson, Helen M. & Chuang, Erika S.. 1999. Glottal characteristics of male speakers: Acoustic correlates and comparison with female data. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 106, 1064–1077.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hanson, Helen M., Stevens, Kenneth N., Kuo, Hong-Kwang Jeff, Chen, Marilyn Y. & Slifka, Janet. 2001. Towards models of phonation. Journal of Phonetics 29 (4), 451–480.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henrich, Nathalie, d'Alessandro, Christophe & Doval, Boris. 2001. Spectral correlates of voice open quotient and glottal flow asymmetry: Theory, limits, and experimental data. In EUROSPEECH-2001, 47–50. Aalborg, Denmark, September 2001.Google Scholar
Hillenbrand, James, Cleveland, Ronald A. & Erickson, Robert L.. 1994. Acoustic correlates of breathy vocal quality. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 37, 769–778.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Holmberg, Eva B., Hillman, Robert E. & Perkell, Joseph S.. 1989. Glottal airflow and transglottal air pressure measurements for male and female speakers in low, normal, and high pitch. Journal of Voice 3, 294–305.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmberg, Eva B., Hillman, Roger E., Perkell, Joseph S., Guiod, Peter & Goldman, Susan L.. 1995. Comparisons among aerodynamic, electroglottographic, and acoustic spectral measures of female voice. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 38, 1212–1223.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hombert, Jean-Marie, Ohala, John & Ewan, William. 1979. Phonetic explanations for the development of tones. Language 55 (1), 37–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huffman, Franklin E. 1985. The phonology of Chong: A Mon-Khmer language of Thailand. In Ratanakul, Suriya, Thomas, David & Premsrirat, Suwilai (eds.), Southeast Asian linguistic studies presented to André-G. Haudricourt, 355–388. Bangkok: Mahidol University.Google Scholar
Iseli, Markus, Shue, Yen-Liang & Alwan, Abeer. 2007. Age, sex, and vowel dependencies of acoustical measures related to the voice source. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 121, 2283–2295.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kawahara, Hideki, de Cheveigné, Alain & Patterson, Roy D.. 1998. An instantaneous-frequency-based pitch extraction method for high-quality speech transformation: Revised TEMPO in the STRAIGHT-suite. ICSLP–1998, paper 0659.Google Scholar
Keating, Patricia & Shue, Yen-Liang. 2009. Voice quality variation with fundamental frequency in English and Mandarin. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 126, 2221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kingston, John. 2005. The phonetics of Athabaskan tonogenesis. In Hargus, Sharon & Rice, Keren (eds.), Athabaskan prosody, 137–184. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirk, Paul L. 1966. Proto-Mazatec phonology. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington.Google Scholar
Kirk, Paul L., Ladefoged, Peter & Ladefoged, Jenny. 1984. Using a spectrograph for measures of phonation types in a natural language. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 59, 102–113.Google Scholar
Kirk, Paul L., Ladefoged, Jenny & Ladefoged, Peter. 1993. Quantifying acoustic properties of modal, breathy, and creaky vowels in Jalapa Mazatec. In Mattina, Anthony & Montler, Timothy (eds.), American Indian linguistics and ethnography in honor of Lawrence C. Thompson, 435–450. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan.Google Scholar
Klatt, Dennis & Klatt, Laura. 1990. Analysis, synthesis, and perception of voice quality variations among female and male talkers. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 87, 820–857.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
König, Christa & Heine, Bernd. 2001. The !Xun of Ekoka: A demographic and linguistic report. Cologne: Institut für Afrikanistik, Universität Köln.Google Scholar
Kreiman, Jody, Gerratt, Bruce R. & Antoñanzas-Barroso, Norma. 2007. Measures of the glottal source spectrum. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 50, 595–610.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kreiman, Jody, Gerratt, Bruce R. & Khan, Sameer ud Dowla. 2010. Effects of native language on perception of voice quality. Journal of Phonetics 38, 588–593.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kreiman, Jody, Iseli, Markus, Neubauer, Juergen, Shue, Yen-Liang, Gerratt, Bruce R. & Alwan, Abeer. 2008. The relationship between open quotient and H1*-H2*. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 124 (4), 2495.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuang, Jianjing. 2011. Production and perception of the phonation contrast in Yi. M.A. thesis, UCLA.Google Scholar
Ladefoged, Peter. 1971. Preliminaries to linguistic phonetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Ladefoged, Peter. 1983. The linguistic use of different phonation types. In Bless, Diane M. & Abbs, James H. (eds.), Vocal fold physiology: Contemporary research and clinical issues, 351–360. San Diego, CA: College Hill Press.Google Scholar
Lam, Hiu Wai & Yu, Kristine M.. 2010. The role of creaky voice quality in Cantonese tonal perception. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 127, 2023.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laver, John. 1980. The phonetic description of voice quality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Löfqvist, Anders & McGowan, Richard S.. 1992. Influence of consonantal envelope on voice source aerodynamics. Journal of Phonetics 20, 93–110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, Amanda. 2007. Guttural consonants and guttural co-articulation in Ju|’hoansi. Journal of Phonetics 35 (1), 56–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller-Ockhuizen, Amanda. 2003. The phonetics and phonology of gutturals: A case study from Juǀ’hoansi (Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics). New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
R Development Core Team. 2008. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. http://www.R-project.org (14 January 2009).Google Scholar
Shue, Yen-Liang, Keating, Patricia & Vicenik, Chad. 2009. VOICESAUCE: A program for voice analysis. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 126, 2221. [Program available online at http://www.ee.ucla.edu/~spapl/voicesauce.]CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverman, Daniel. 1996. Phonology at the interface of morphology and phonetics: Root-final laryngeals in Chong, Korean, and Sanskrit. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 5, 301–322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverman, Daniel. 1997. Phasing and recoverability (Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Silverman, Daniel. 2003. Pitch discrimination during breathy versus modal phonation. In Local, John, Ogden, Richard & Temple, Rosalind (eds.), Papers in laboratory phonology VI, 293–304. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Silverman, Daniel, Blankenship, Barbara, Kirk, Paul L. & Ladefoged, Peter. 1995. Phonetic structures in Jalapa Mazatec. Anthropological Linguistics 37 (1), 70–88.Google Scholar
Sjölander, Kåre. 2004. Snack sound toolkit, KTH Stockholm, Sweden. http://www.speech.kth.se/snack.Google Scholar
Stevens, Kenneth N. 1977. Physics of laryngeal behavior and larynx modes. Phonetica 34, 264–279.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Thongkum, Theraphan. 1988. Phonation types in Mon-Khmer languages. In Fujimura, Osamu (ed.), Vocal physiology: Voice production, mechanisms and functions, 319–333. New York: Raven Press.Google Scholar
Titze, Ingo R. 1995. Definitions and nomenclature related to voice quality. In Fujimura, Osamu & Hirano, Minoru (eds.), Vocal fold physiology: Voice quality control, 335–342. San Diego, CA: Singular.Google Scholar
Traill, Anthony. 1985. Phonetic and phonological studies of !Xóõ Bushman (Quellen zur Khoisan-Forschung 5). Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag.Google Scholar
Wayland, Ratree & Jongman, Allard. 2003. Acoustic correlates of breathy and clear vowels: The case of Khmer. Journal of Phonetics 31, 181–201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar