The feature [stiff] interacts with intonation to affect vocal-fold vibration characteristics

Abstract

As part of a larger study of the effect of prosody on segmental cues, previous work has shown that in a high pitch environment, F0 is significantly increased relative to a baseline following voiceless obstruents, but F0 closely follows the baseline following voiced obstruents. When a syllable carries a low or no pitch accent, F0 is increased only slightly following all obstruents. It is suggested that this difference occurs because demands of the segmental and prosodic levels of speech production conflict. In particular, results support a theory that the primary feature of voiced or voiceless obstruents is [.-stiff] or [+stiff] vocal folds, respectively. Enhancing features such as [-.spread] or [+spread] vocal folds are secondary. In a high pitch environment, the feature [-.stiff] conflicts with the need to raise pitch. Because of enhancing gestures, the prosodic level can override the segmental. Likewise, in a low pitch environment, the feature [+stiff] conflicts, so the vocal folds will not be stiffened for voiceless obstruents. If so, one might expect that stop consonants in low pitch environments will have longer or stronger prevoicing than in high pitch environments, and preliminary data show that speakers do show this tendency. [Work supported by NIH Grant DC04331.]