Electroglottographic and acoustic measures of phonation across languages

Abstract

Many less-commonly studied languages use phonation contrastively: vowels, and therefore words, can differ in phonation type. Most such languages contrast two or three phonation categories. In other languages, a lexical tone (contrastive pitch) may typically have a redundant non-modal phonation. We have collected electroglottographic and audio recordings from speakers of six languages with one or both of these uses of phonation (Bo, Gujarati, Hani, White Hmong, Mandarin, Yi) and analyzed them with EGGWORKS. EGGWORKS is a free program which automates several EGG measures and works together with VoiceSauce, a free program which automates many acoustic voice quality measures. Comparisons of the EGG and acoustic measures within and across languages, and their correlations, will be presented. We have also applied functional data analysis to EGG pulse shapes and will describe the relations of the factors underlying the shapes to the EGG and acoustic measures. [Work supported by NSF.]