The timing and sequencing of coarticulated non-modal phonation in English and White Hmong

Abstract

Despite the growing number of studies on the acoustics of non-modal phonation, little is known about how two distinct non-modal phonations can interact acoustically when coarticulated. This study investigates the acoustics of breathy-to-creaky phonation contours in vowels from a production study of native speakers of English and White Hmong. These languages differ in the nature of the non-modal phonation types. In the English corpus, both the breathiness and creakiness are non-contrastive. In the Hmong corpus, the breathiness can be contrastive or a result of coarticulation with a neighboring segment, but the creakiness is always contrastive. The contours were analyzed using the three measures of phonation that were found to best differentiate non-modal from modal phonation in these languages: H1 ⁎–H2 ⁎, H1 ⁎–A1 ⁎, and harmonics-to-noise ratio. Results from these measures provide support for the presence of breathy–creaky contours in vowels. The timing and sequencing of the breathy and creaky phonation types are largely dependent on whether they are contrastive, with contrastive non-modal phonation being present during more portions of the vowel than non-modal phonation derived from coarticulation. The acoustic results also provide evidence for simultaneous breathy and creaky phonation types in Hmong.