Acoustic effects of phonetic conditions and laryngeal specification on phonation in English voiceless obstruents

Abstract

A detailed acoustic analysis of phonation in voiceless obstruents in American English (AE) is presented to investigate potential acoustic outcomes of the laryngeal coordination relationships that have been reported in the literature. The current study examines the realization of phonation in voiceless obstruents in a corpus of read speech (37 AE speakers). Similar to phonation in voiced obstruents (Davidson 2016), linguistic factors such as phrase and word position, stress, and the preceding phoneme condition the presence and degree of phonation during the constriction period of stops and fricatives. The amount of phonation present is further analyzed by characterizing where in the constriction interval phonation appears. Carryover phonation (or “bleed”) from a preceding sonorant is most common for stops, while a “trough” pattern (phonation that dies out and then begins again before the end of the closure) is more prevalent for fricatives. The linguistic conditioning factors, and the overall lower rate of partial voicing and proportion of phonation in the constriction as compared to voiced obstruents, illustrate the acoustic and aerodynamic consequences of the various laryngeal coordination patterns that have been proposed for English voiceless obstruents in different prosodic environments.