Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 113-116).

System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Accompanied by 2 recitals, recorded Oct. 5, 2006, and Apr. 1, 2009. Includes bibliographical references (p. 46-50).

While handling the task of speaker identification, forensic phoneticians use a combination of various parameters contained in different levels of speech signal. The main aim of the present thesis is to explore whether glottalization in Czech may be considered as a potentially useful parameter in this sense. In our research, we focus on the rate of prevocalic glottalization at word boundaries and we distinguish between different realisations of glottalization: canonical glottal stop and its hypoarticulated form - creaky voice. The studied material consists of repeated recordings of three male and four female speakers and contains both read text and spontaneous speech. The results do not indicate that the same speaker would use glottalization differently in the first and second recording, but a difference in glottalization is found between speakers. From the forensic phonetics point of view, this finding seems to be useful. Marginally, some other factors which are not directly connected with the speaker (height of following vowel, lexical factors and speech rate) were examined, but no influence on glottalization was found. Keywords: glottal stop, glottalization, forensic phonetics, speaker identification

O objetivo desta pesquisa é descrever a fonética dos fenômenos de glotalizaçãolaringalização e examinar de forma preliminar seu status fonológico em três línguas pertencentes ao grupo linguístico Tukano Oriental: Tuyuka, Tukano e Makuna. Para levar a cabo este trabalho foi realizada uma pesquisa de campo na que se coletaram aproximadamente 140 palavras nas três línguas. Os dados foram coletados com quatro falantes nativos de cada língua duas mulheres e dois homens. A análise fonética apresentada corresponde a observações das diversas disposições anatômicas da laringe na produção dos fenômenos de glotalização-laringalização, assim como dos seus correlatos acústicos, tipo VOT para aspiração, e inclinação espectral, frequência fundamental e duração para laringalização. A análise fonológica corresponde à caracterização dos fenômenos de glotalização-laringalização através do uso do modelo de traço [±cet] de Moisik & Esling (2011) e de marcadores prosódicos apresentado em Gordon & Ladefoged (2001). Resultados obtidos mostram que em duas línguas há realização de fenômenos de pós-aspiração, vogais desvozeadas e voz rangeada. A pós-aspiração ocorre em consoantes surdas em duas línguas, não é contrastiva e é condicionada principalmente pela ocorrência de vogais altas. As vogais ensurdecidas estão presentes em Tuyuka e Tukano e ocorrem unicamente depois da primeira vogal de um subconjunto de morfemas de raiz com padrão silábico (C)VhV. A voz rangeada está presente em Tukano e minimamente em Makuna; ocorre depois da primeira vogal de um subconjunto de raízes com padrão silábico (C)VV/(C)V(C)V e apresenta pelo menos três diferentes realizações (oclusiva glotal, transição laringalizada e mudanças bruscas na intensidade entre vogal modal e vogal com voz rangeada). Quando ensurdecimento e laringalização acontecem, o tom associado à primeira vogal é baixo. A partir da análise das semelhanças fonéticas e fonológicas destes fenômenos assim como da fricativa glotal esta pesquisa propõe a realização de um suprassegmento laríngeo que ocorre na primeira mora de um subconjunto de morfemas raiz e cuja função é a de marcar fronteira prosódica: limite bimoráico no interior de silaba e limite silábico em padrões bissilábicos. / The goal of this research is to describe the phonetics of glottalization-laringalization phenomena and to offer a preliminary examination of its phonological status in three Eastern Tucanoan languages: Tuyuca, Tucano and Macuna. A collection of approximately 140 words was elicited in each language during fieldwork. The data comes from four native speakers of each language: two women and two men. The phonetic analysis corresponds to observations of different laryngeal settings in the production of glottalizationlaringalization phenomena, and their acoustic correlates such as VOT for aspiration, and spectral tilt, fundamental frequency and duration for laringalization. As for the phonological analysis, a characterization of the glottalization-laringalization phenomena, using the laryngeal feature [± cet] of Moisik & Esling (2011) and prosodic markers of Gordon & Ladefoged (2001), was suggested. Results show that two languages have post aspiration, voiceless vowels and creaky voice. Post aspiration occurs in voiceless consonants in two languages, is not contrastive and is conditioned mainly by the occurrence of high vowels. Voiceless vowels are present in Tuyuca and Tucano, and occur only after the first vowel of a subset of root morphemes with syllabic pattern (C)VhV. Finally, creaky voice is present in Tucano and less in Macuna; it occurs after the first vowel of a subset of root morphemes with syllablic patterns (C)VV/(C)V(C)V, and it has at least three different phonetic realizations (glottal stop, laringalized transitions, and abrupt changes in intensity between modal and creaky voice). When voicelessness and creaky voice are produced, the tone associated with the first vowel is low. Considering the phonetic and phonological similarities of these phenomena including the glottal fricative-, this study proposes the realization of a laryngeal suprasegment that occurs on the first mora of a subset of root morphemes, whose function is to mark two types of prosodic boundaries: a bimoraic limit within the syllable and a syllabic boundary in dissilabic patterns.

O objetivo desta pesquisa é descrever a fonética dos fenômenos de glotalizaçãolaringalização e examinar de forma preliminar seu status fonológico em três línguas pertencentes ao grupo linguístico Tukano Oriental: Tuyuka, Tukano e Makuna. Para levar a cabo este trabalho foi realizada uma pesquisa de campo na que se coletaram aproximadamente 140 palavras nas três línguas. Os dados foram coletados com quatro falantes nativos de cada língua duas mulheres e dois homens. A análise fonética apresentada corresponde a observações das diversas disposições anatômicas da laringe na produção dos fenômenos de glotalização-laringalização, assim como dos seus correlatos acústicos, tipo VOT para aspiração, e inclinação espectral, frequência fundamental e duração para laringalização. A análise fonológica corresponde à caracterização dos fenômenos de glotalização-laringalização através do uso do modelo de traço [±cet] de Moisik & Esling (2011) e de marcadores prosódicos apresentado em Gordon & Ladefoged (2001). Resultados obtidos mostram que em duas línguas há realização de fenômenos de pós-aspiração, vogais desvozeadas e voz rangeada. A pós-aspiração ocorre em consoantes surdas em duas línguas, não é contrastiva e é condicionada principalmente pela ocorrência de vogais altas. As vogais ensurdecidas estão presentes em Tuyuka e Tukano e ocorrem unicamente depois da primeira vogal de um subconjunto de morfemas de raiz com padrão silábico (C)VhV. A voz rangeada está presente em Tukano e minimamente em Makuna; ocorre depois da primeira vogal de um subconjunto de raízes com padrão silábico (C)VV/(C)V(C)V e apresenta pelo menos três diferentes realizações (oclusiva glotal, transição laringalizada e mudanças bruscas na intensidade entre vogal modal e vogal com voz rangeada). Quando ensurdecimento e laringalização acontecem, o tom associado à primeira vogal é baixo. A partir da análise das semelhanças fonéticas e fonológicas destes fenômenos assim como da fricativa glotal esta pesquisa propõe a realização de um suprassegmento laríngeo que ocorre na primeira mora de um subconjunto de morfemas raiz e cuja função é a de marcar fronteira prosódica: limite bimoráico no interior de silaba e limite silábico em padrões bissilábicos. / The goal of this research is to describe the phonetics of glottalization-laringalization phenomena and to offer a preliminary examination of its phonological status in three Eastern Tucanoan languages: Tuyuca, Tucano and Macuna. A collection of approximately 140 words was elicited in each language during fieldwork. The data comes from four native speakers of each language: two women and two men. The phonetic analysis corresponds to observations of different laryngeal settings in the production of glottalizationlaringalization phenomena, and their acoustic correlates such as VOT for aspiration, and spectral tilt, fundamental frequency and duration for laringalization. As for the phonological analysis, a characterization of the glottalization-laringalization phenomena, using the laryngeal feature [± cet] of Moisik & Esling (2011) and prosodic markers of Gordon & Ladefoged (2001), was suggested. Results show that two languages have post aspiration, voiceless vowels and creaky voice. Post aspiration occurs in voiceless consonants in two languages, is not contrastive and is conditioned mainly by the occurrence of high vowels. Voiceless vowels are present in Tuyuca and Tucano, and occur only after the first vowel of a subset of root morphemes with syllabic pattern (C)VhV. Finally, creaky voice is present in Tucano and less in Macuna; it occurs after the first vowel of a subset of root morphemes with syllablic patterns (C)VV/(C)V(C)V, and it has at least three different phonetic realizations (glottal stop, laringalized transitions, and abrupt changes in intensity between modal and creaky voice). When voicelessness and creaky voice are produced, the tone associated with the first vowel is low. Considering the phonetic and phonological similarities of these phenomena including the glottal fricative-, this study proposes the realization of a laryngeal suprasegment that occurs on the first mora of a subset of root morphemes, whose function is to mark two types of prosodic boundaries: a bimoraic limit within the syllable and a syllabic boundary in dissilabic patterns.

This study focuses on the phonetics of creaky voice saliency and the perceptual sociolinguistic indexes that are evoked during creaky voice use. This study consists of two experiments: the first a listener judgment based Likert scale, the second an AXB study. The first experiment used modal and creaky voice statement-of-fact tokens to determine whether the speaker is or isn’t x characteristic (intelligent, feminine, educated, masculine, hesitant, and confident). This study found that both male and female speakers were found to be less intelligent, less educated, less feminine, more masculine, less confident, and more hesitant when using creaky voice phonation as compared to the modal register. Participants also rated male and female speakers as statistically different. During the second experiment the participants listened to continuums that went from modal register to extreme creaky voice (based on F0 levels). Participants performed an AXB task to determine ability at distinguishing levels of creaky voice along the continuum. This study found that participants were less able to correctly detect the level of creaky voice in the female speaker for the lower half of the continuum when compared to the male speaker.

Speech communication encompasses diverse types of information, including phonetics, affective state, voice quality, and speaker identity. From a speech production standpoint, the acoustic speech signal can be mainly divided into glottal source and vocal tract components, which play distinct roles in rendering the various types of information it contains. Most deployed speech analysis systems, however, do not explicitly represent these two components as distinct entities, as their joint estimation from the acoustic speech signal becomes an ill-defined blind deconvolution problem. Nevertheless, because of the desire to understand glottal behavior and how it relates to perceived voice quality, there has been continued interest in explicitly estimating the glottal component of the speech signal. To this end, several inverse filtering (IF) algorithms have been proposed, but they are unreliable in practice because of the blind formulation of the separation problem. In an effort to develop a method that can bypass the challenging IF process, this thesis proposes a new glottal source information extraction method that relies on supervised machine learning to transform smoothed spectral representations of speech, which are already used in some of the most widely deployed and successful speech analysis applications, into a set of glottal source features. A transformation method based on Gaussian mixture regression (GMR) is presented and compared to current IF methods in terms of feature similarity, reliability, and speaker discrimination capability on a large speech corpus, and potential representations of the spectral envelope of speech are investigated for their ability represent glottal source variation in a predictable manner. The proposed system was found to produce glottal source features that reasonably matched their IF counterparts in many cases, while being less susceptible to spurious errors. The development of the proposed method entailed a study into the aspects of glottal source information that are already contained within the spectral features commonly used in speech analysis, yielding an objective assessment regarding the expected advantages of explicitly using glottal information extracted from the speech signal via currently available IF methods, versus the alternative of relying on the glottal source information that is implicitly contained in spectral envelope representations.

(English) The dissertation explores the vowel system of Czech L3 Spanish, focusing on three facets of its architecture: vowel quality (following SLM by Flege 1995, 1999, 2003), vowel quantity and vocalic sequences between words. Preliminary studies (Čechová 2013, 2014) suggest that there might be some evidence for the Mechanism of Equivalence in Czech L3 Spanish, since the vowel spaces of both languages consist of the same categories, with different phonetic realizations. Hence, the more similar the sounds are, the harder it is to capture the relevant difference, necessary to attain native-like pronunciation. Vowel quantity, being traditionally associated with the phonological feature of length in Czech (Palková 1994), is not present in Spanish, and compensating for that property, some Czech speakers tend to pronounce accented syllables with extraordinarily longer durations. Finally, vowel sequences in Spanish are usually subjetct to resyllabification, whereas Czech prefers glottalization to keep morphemes of words separated. These predictions were tested in 22 university Czech students with advanced level of Spanish (C1-C1). Subsequent analysis revealed consistent inclination towards L1 in terms of vowel quality, in less extent in vowel quantity, and although the prevalecent strategy for majority...

An examination of the historical treatises of Manuel Garcia II and Giambattista Mancini, scientific studies pertaining to glottal closure, and Vocal Function Exercises used in clinical speech pathology led to an exploratory study that attempted to increase the glottal closure in an untrained university male chorus using only choral voice building exercises. The exploratory study used a single group, pre-test post-test design, and data was recorded using audio recordings of the entire chorus as well as electroglottograph measurements of individual subjects. The data show an increase in glottal closure as measured by closed quotient values, and an increase in energy in the upper partials of the recorded acoustic signal from the chorus.

Glottalization, as significant irregularity of glottal pulsing, fulfils a number of linguistic functions and can occur in various contexts. This paper examines the rate of vowel-related glottalization of non-syllabic prepositions when native Russian speakers read Czech speech. In Czech, just like in other languages there is a relatively high frequency of glottalization. The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that could influence it. The speakers produced a short read text which contained 59 potential neslabičné prepositions where glottalization could occur in standard pronunciation. The basic set of the perceptual analysis and statistical processing consisted of 582 items. The rate of glottalization in individual speakers ranged from 0 % to 90 % , where the average volume is regulary based at 49 %. Statistical significance of differences in the frequency of the analyzed groups created on the basis of monitored aspects were calculated using the chi-square test.