Acoustic properties of /h/

Abstract

The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to investigate the physical mechanisms of sound generation for the consonant /h/ and (2) to examine the timing of supraglottal and glottal movements of /h/. Utterances in which /h/ was present or absent (e.g., “new heart” versus “new art”) were analyzed acoustically and contrasted. The corpus consisted of about 20 such utterances repeated several times by three speakers. The acoustic data showed evidence of breathy voicing at the /h/‐vowel boundary in all cases, and that generation of turbulence noise during the consonant occurred both in the vicinity of the glottis (aspiration noise) and the vicinity of the supraglottal constriction (frication noise). The relative contribution of the two noise sources depended on the vowel, with greater frication noise occurring for high vowels. When an /h/ was in position between two vowels or glides, it generally added little or no duration to the utterance, relative to the contrasting utterance with no /h/. Implications for the ph...