Institute of Acoustics and Speech Communication, Chair of System Theory and Speech Technology Department of Speech, Music & Hearing
Perception of Glottalization in Varying Pitch Contexts Across LanguagesMaria Paola Bissiri, Margaret Zellers
[email protected], [email protected]
1 Association of glottalization and pitch
• Glottalization often associated with low pitch in intonationallanguages
Figure 1: Glottalization: F0 lowering, damping and aperiod-icity [1] (“only on the” by native German femalespeaker).
• However, glottalization also associated to high tones in manytone languages [2, 3] and even in intonation languages [4, 1]
2 AXB listening experiment
2.1 Creation of modal and glottalized stimuli
naturally produced in modal and glottalized version.
Final contour = mid
Final contour = rise
Final contour = fall
Initial contour = mid
Initial contour = rise
Initial contour = fall
220 Hz
+3 st
-3 st
Figure 2: Schematic of possible pitch contours.
Figure 3: Spectrogram of /na/ sequence with a) pitch points at35, 220, 35 and 220 Hz added in the transition and b)glottalization spliced into final syllable.
2.2 Procedure of AXB experiment
Figure 4: User interface of AXB listening test (Praat) of 17-20min. duration and schematic of experiment.
2.3 German, English and Swedish listeners
N=35, N=13, and N=14
German English Swedish
Correct responses to control comparisons
% o
f cor
rect
res
pons
es0
1020
3040
5060
70
< 90 90−94.9 95−99 100
5 5
12 13
01
6 6
10
8
5
Figure 5: Required accuracy 90%, counts on bars.
3 Results of test comparisons
Fall Mid Rise
Fall vs Mid
Initial contour
% o
f res
pons
es0
2040
6080
100
Fall Mid Rise
Fall vs Rise
Initial contour
% o
f res
pons
es0
2040
6080
100
Fall Mid Rise
Mid vs Rise
Initial contour
% o
f res
pons
es0
2040
6080
100
Fall Mid Rise
Figure 6: Responses by all listeners when they had to choosebetween a) a falling and a mid, b) a falling and a rising,and c) a mid and a rising contour.
Fall Mid RiseInitial contour
% o
f res
pons
es0
2040
6080
100 German (p < 0.05*)
Fall Mid RiseInitial contour
% o
f res
pons
es0
2040
6080
100 English (p < 0.05*)
Fall Mid RiseInitial contour
% o
f res
pons
es0
2040
6080
100 Swedish (n.s.*)
Fall Mid
Figure 7: Responses by German, English and Swedish listen-ers when they had to choose between a falling and amid contour (* Pearson’s χ2 test).
4 Discussion: Hypothesis A and
influence of initial pitch
5 Conclusions
References[1] Redi, L. and Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. (2001). Variation in the realization of glottalization
in normal speakers, Journal of Phonetics 29: 407-429.
[2] Gordon, M. and Ladefoged, P. (2001). Phonation types: a cross- linguistic overview.Journal of Phonetics 29: 383-406.
[3] Gussenhoven, C. (2004). The phonology of tone and intonation. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press.
[4] Pierrehumbert, J. and Talkin, D. (1992). Lenition of /h/ and glottal stop. In Papers inLaboratory Phonology II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 90-117.
[5] Zellers, M. and Post, B. (2010). Aperiodicity at topic structure boundaries. In Proceed-ings of Speech Prosody 2010, Chicago, USA.
[6] Ogden, R. (2003). Voice quality as a resource for the management of turn-taking inFinnish talk-in-interaction. In Proceedings of 15th Intern. Congress of Phonetic Sci-ences, Barcelona, Spain.
[7] Bissiri, M.P., Lecumberri, M.L., Cooke, M., and Volín, J. (2011). The role of word-initial glottal stops in recognizing English words. Proceedings of Interspeech 2011,Florence, Italy, pp. 165-168.
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This research was supported by a Marie Curie Intra European Fellowship within the 7th European Community Framework Programme and by a postdoctoral research grant from the Swedish Science Foundation (Vetenskapsrådet).
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