The independence of phrasal creak and segmental glottalization in American English

Jailyn Peña,Lisa Davidson,Shmico Orosco

doi:10.1121/10.0005601

Abstract

This study compared fundamental frequency (F0), H1*-H2*, H1*-A1*, and harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR) measures during intervals of three types of segmental glottalization and intervals of prosodic, phrasal creak. Results show that phrasal creak differs from all segmental glottalization types with lower F0 and H1*-H2* and higher HNR. /t/ glottalization before syllabic nasals has lower H1*-A1* than all other creaky phonation types, indicating concurrent pre-nasalization of segments preceding nasals, and coda /t/ glottalization has lower HNR than vowel-initial glottalization. A positive relationship between rates of segmental glottalization and phrasal creak suggests that speakers do not avoid their co-occurrence despite potential perceptual confusability.

Highlights

In the linguistics literature, “creaky phonation,” “creak,” “laryngealization,” and “glottalization” are all terms that have been used in connection with nonmodal phonation types produced with thickened vocal folds and increased laryngeal and/or vocal fold constriction relative to modal phonation (Catford, 1964; Laver, 1980; Gordon and Ladefoged, 2001; Esling et al, 2019; Garellek, 2019)
This type of phonation is characterized as typically having a lower fundamental frequency (F0), a lower difference between the amplitudes of the first and second harmonics (H1Ã-H2Ã, with the asterisks indicating that the measure is corrected for vowel formant frequencies and their bandwidths), and greater noise in the acoustic signal [measured by cepstral peak prominence (CPP) or another measure of harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR)] than modal phonation (Garellek, 2015, 2019)
Vowel-initial glottalization is significantly noisier than /t/ glottalization. This distinction may be consistent with a perceptual explanation that speakers do differentiate vowel-initial glottalization, which may be due to an epenthetic glottal stop, and coda /t/ glottalization to signal to the listener that the segmental source of the creaky phonation differs between these two types

Summary

Introduction

“creaky phonation,” “creak,” “laryngealization,” and “glottalization” are all terms that have been used in connection with nonmodal phonation types produced with thickened vocal folds and increased laryngeal and/or vocal fold constriction relative to modal phonation (Catford, 1964; Laver, 1980; Gordon and Ladefoged, 2001; Esling et al, 2019; Garellek, 2019). While terms referring to types or uses of creaky phonation are not always used consistently across the literature, for the purposes of this paper, we use “glottalization” to refer to segmental uses of creaky phonation and “phrasal creak” when referring to creaky phonation that serves a prosodic or intonational purpose

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion