Abstract
The utterance “How are you?” was produced by ten female speakers of American English in two conditions: smiling and not smiling. Spectrographic analysis revealed that smiling had no observable effect on the first two formant frequencies of the last stressed vowel [u]. However, cross sections of the vowel revealed a strong peak of intensity around 2500 Hz, which was identified as “singer's formant.” It is suggested that this formant is a result of laryngeal constriction in the aryepiglottic sphincter muscle above the vocal folds. A perception experiment showed that ten female listeners could distinguish significantly between “smiling” and “unsmiling” stimuli, and that they were equally confident about both types of judgments.
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