Acoustic and laryngographic measures of the laryngeal reflexesof linguistic prominence and vocal effort in German

摘要

This study uses acoustic and physiological measures to compare laryngeal reflexes of globalchanges in vocal effort to the effects of modulating such aspects of linguistic prominence assentence accent, induced by focus variation, and word stress. Seven speakers were recorded byusing a laryngograph. The laryngographic pulses were preprocessed to normalize time andamplitude. The laryngographic pulse shape was quantified using open and skewness quotients andalso by applying a functional version of the principal component analysis. Acoustic measuresincluded the acoustic open quotient and spectral balance in the vowel /e/ during the test syllable. Theopen quotient and the laryngographic pulse shape indicated a significantly shorter open phase forloud speech than for soft speech. Similar results were found for lexical stress, suggesting that lexicalstress and loud speech are produced with a similar voice source mechanism. Stressed syllables weredistinguished from unstressed syllables by their open phase and pulse shape, even in the absence ofsentence accent. Evidence for laryngeal involvement in signaling focus, independent of fundamentalfrequency changes, was not as consistent across speakers. Acoustic results on various spectralbalance measures were generally much less consistent compared to results from laryngographicdata.