Laryngeal timing constraints in plosive‐vowel and fricative‐vowel syllables, or: Is VOT really the best measure of glottal‐supraglottal timing?

Abstract

Voice‐onset time (VOT) is generally defined as the time interval between release of an occlusive consonant and the onset of vocal‐cord vibration. This description, however, does not allow a simple comparison of glottal‐supraglottal timing between syllables initiated with stop and fricative manners of articulation, since the time of release associated with fricative is less well defined than that associated with stops. We compare glottal‐supraglottal timing across consonant manner of articulation by normalizing the duration of selected target utterances spoken in a sentence frame by 15 subjects, and deriving a measure which expresses the timing of glottal‐supraglottal events relative to the duration of a potential unit of articulatory encoding, viz., the syllable. Additional motivation for developing an alternative measure to VOT comes from preliminary data reported by Umeda and Coker [J. Phonetics 2, 1–5 (1974)], which suggests that stop closure duration and VOT are not independent in connected speech. We...