Weak voicing in fricative production

Abstract

Understanding of the production mechanisms of voiced fricatives lags significantly behind that of other phonemic categories of speech. This paper presents a new voicing classification criterion to distinguish the voicing in fricatives from that of their contextual vowels in VCV tokens: weak vs strong voicing. The criterion is based on the oral airflow, distinguishing it from previous criteria based jointly on the acoustic and EGG signals. Aerodynamic and EGG recordings of four normal adult speakers (two females and two males), producing a speech corpus of 9 isolated words with the European Portuguese (EP) voiced fricatives /v, z, ʒ/ in word-initial, -medial and -final position, and the same 9 words embedded in 42 different real EP carrier sentences, were analysed. Fricatives were characterised in terms of oral airflow, fundamental frequency, first formant intensity level and glottal open quotient in absolute terms and relative to the values found in their surrounding vowels. The voicing during fricative production presented properties distinct from the voicing of the contextual vowels, leading to the development of a classification criterion based on the relative amplitude of the oscillations in the oral airflow signal. This contributes to distinguish voicing in fricatives from the modal voicing of the vowels.