Utterance–final voice quality variations: Their perceptual structure and acoustic correlates

Abstract

Voice quality variations can be used to mark prosodic and discourse boundaries in running speech. In order to quantify acoustic events in the signal during the production of these voice qualities, it is necessary to first discover their perceptual structure. The perceptual structure can then inform the acoustic analysis and help to find perceptually salient acoustic correlates. In this study, a perceptual experiment was run in which the stimuli were single words spoken by multiple talkers, which had all been extracted from the ends of utterances. Pairs of stimuli were given similarity ratings by listeners, and the similarity ratings were used in a multidimensional scaling analysis. The dimensions found in the multidimensional scaling analysis were interpreted using acoustic analysis. The voice qualities of the female voices in this study were found to have a primary perceptual split which was interpretable acoustically as laryngealized versus nonlaryngealized, but the voice qualities found in the male voices did not group into categories, and the perceptual dimensions were not as clearly interpretable in acoustic terms.