Acoustic correlates of breathy and clear phonation types

Abstract

Only a decade ago were types of phonation shown to have a phonological function in a language. Several languages spoken in Southeast Asia were claimed to have contrastive phonation type (i.e., clear, breathy and creaky) in their vowel systems. Several different techniques were employed to investigate this phenomenon. These included examining the physical appearance of the acoustic wave form, inverse-filtering, measuring the difference between amplitude of the first and the second harmonics (H1–H2), or between the first harmonic and the most prominent harmonic in the F1 and F3 regions (H1–A1, H1–A3), harmonic-to-noise ratio (HNR) as well as some aerodynamic techniques. This present study proposes to investigate the breathy versus clear phonation contrast phenomenon in Chong, a Mon-Khmer language spoken in Thailand using several of the above-mentioned techniques. Preliminary analysis suggested that only the H1–H2 values obtained for breathy vowels were greater than for clear vowels. The nonsignificant difference between breathy and clear vowels in Chong in other dimensions will be discussed in relation to the question of whether or not Chong should be classified as a phonation-type language.