Laryngeal Articulations Research Articles

Northern Lisu vowels & tones, and their interactions

Lisu is a Sino-Tibetan language of Central Ngwi branch. It has multiple tonal contrasts and a typologically unusual vowel inventory. In this talk, I present an acoustic phonetic study based on data collected from eleven speakers of Northern Lisu, spoken in Nujiang Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan, Southwestern China. The study focuses on the vowels and tones of the language, and their interaction. Northern Lisu has six tones, including four modal and two creaky-voiced tones; it has ten vowels, including five front vowels, four back vowels, and a central “fricative” vowel. Tone and vowel interaction is analyzed using Esling’s Laryngeal Articulator Model. Results show all speakers produce a lower f0 in the retracted vowel context, but it is not the case that all tones are creakier in this same vowel context. Simultaneously, male and female speakers show differences in terms of voice quality. Examination of the vowel space shows a reduction in many vowel contrasts. It is suggested that the vowel space is becoming regularised, with perceptually difficult contrasts being neutralised. In addition, it is shown that the fricative vowel contains minimal frication compared to the fricative consonants, and as such is better described as a syllabic retroflex approximant.

Oral and Laryngeal Articulation Control of Voicing in Children with and without Speech Sound Disorders.

Voicing contrast is hard to master during speech motor development, and the phonological process of consonant devoicing is very frequent in children with Speech Sound Disorders (SSD). Therefore, the aim of this study was to characterise the oral and laryngeal articulation control strategies used by children with and without SSD as a function of place of articulation. The articulation rate and relative oral airflow amplitude (flow) were used to analyse how children controlled oral articulation; fundamental frequency (fo), open quotient (OQ), and a classification of voicing were used to explore laryngeal behaviour. Data from detailed speech and language assessments, oral airflow and electroglottography signals were collected from 13 children with SSD and 17 children without SSD, aged 5; 0 to 7; 8, using picture naming tasks. Articulation rate and flow in children with and without SSD were not significantly different, but a statistically reliable effect of place on flow was found. Children with and without SSD used different relative fo (which captures changes in fo during the consonant-vowel transition) and OQ values, and place of articulation had an effect on the strength of voicing. All children used very similar oral articulation control of voicing, but children with SSD used less efficient laryngeal articulation strategies (higher subglottal damping and more air from the lungs expelled in each glottal cycle) than children without SSD.

Phonetic and phonological properties of the advanced tongue root feature in African languages

The paper presents an overview of the ATR (advanced tongue root) feature, which is fairly widespread among the Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan languages of the Macro-Sudan Belt. The phonetic section provides a description of the articulatory and acoustic correlates of the feature. The review of the articulatory basis of the feature is presented in a historical perspective, from the fi rst cineradiographic studies of the 1960s till the laryngoscopic studies of the recent years. The paper shows how the introduction of new methods shifted attention from the tongue root movement, which had been given primacy in production of the contrast, to aryepiglotto-epiglottal constriction and a synergistic system of laryngeal articulations. The paper provides a description of several acoustic measures that have been found to correlate with the ATR feature: the frequency of the fi rst formant, the fi rst formant bandwidth, the spectral center of gravity, the relative intensity of the fi rst to the second formant. Similarities and differences between ATR, height and tenseness, which have been largely discussed in the literature, are also described in the paper. The phonological section provides an overview of ATR harmony systems. The main attention is paid to the strong crosslinguistic tendency for [+ATR] to function as the dominant value in languages with ATR contrast among high vowels, but for [−ATR] to be dominant in languages in which ATR is only contrastive for non-high vowels. The paper describes diff erent manifestations of ATR dominance (assimilatory, allophonic, and coalescent dominance) among two major types of underlying vowel inventories.

Гласные первого слога сургутского диалекта хантыйского языка по данным ультразвукового исследования

This paper describes the Surgut Khanty vowel articulation by ultrasonography methods. 193 vowel segments were sampled by Articulate Instruments equipment and processed with Articulate Assistant Advanced software. 97 consonant segments were recorded to estimate a contact influence of vowels on consonants. The data were collected from a woman, a Tromagan dialect native speaker born in 1970. The tongue contours were analyzed by certain features: the highest point and its coordinates, the most remote point and its distance from the coordinate center. The most distant point was found to allow distinguishing three basic tongue movement types according to J. Esling’s laryngeal articulator theory: front movement correlates with phonemes /i:/, /ɨ:/, /ɘ/, /ɛ/, raised movement correlates with phonemes /ʊ:/, /ɔ:/, /ɔ/, /o/, a combination of these two types yields /ʉ/, /ɨ:/, /o:/, and retracted movement is characteristic of phonemes /a:/, /a/. The vocal movement types can be differentiated by the most distant point number. The points 1-8 are placed in the frontal part of the dorsum, the points 9-16 are in the middle part, the points 17-24 are placed in the back part. Front vowels have the most distant point in the range 14-17. Retracted vowels and combination of front and raised position are characterized by 18-19 and raised vowels by 19-20. The distance of tongue shift within each type allows distinguishing individual phonemes. The radical plosive phoneme was proved experimentally to have velar allophone [k] and uvular allophone [q] depending on the vowel row.

Are there no back vowels?

Esling (2005)'s Laryngeal Articulator model of vowels and the traditional grouping of vowels make different predictions for the effects of front and back vowels on non-contrastive rounding in adjacent [∫]. We experimentally measured the rounding of [∫] (operationalized as center of gravity) neighboring different vowels and compared two mixed error-component models representing the theories; we find no significant evidence favoring the retraction model over the traditional model.

Laryngeal Constriction Phenomena in Infant Vocalizations.

Purpose Instances of laryngeal constriction have been noted as a feature of infant vocal development. The purpose of this study was to directly evaluate the developmental occurrence of laryngeal constriction phenomena in infant crying, cooing, and babbling vocalizations. Method The cry and noncry vocalizations of 20 healthy term-born infants between the ages of 1 and 7 months were examined for instances of laryngeal constriction. Approximately 20,000 vocalization samples were acoustically evaluated, applying a combined visual (frequency spectra and melody curves) and auditory analysis; the occurrence of instances of different constriction phenomena was analyzed. Results Laryngeal constrictions were found during the production of cry and noncry vocalizations. The developmental pattern of constrictions for both vocalizations was charac-terized by an increase in constrictions followed by a decrease. During the age period of 3-5 months, when cry and noncry vocalizations were co-occurring, laryngeal constrictions were observed in 14%-22% of both types of vocalizations. An equal percentage of constrictions was found for both vocalizations at 5 months of age. Conclusions The findings confirm that the production of laryngeal constriction is a regularly occurring phenomenon in healthy, normally developing infants' spontaneous crying, cooing, and marginal babbling. The occurrence of constriction in both cry and noncry vocalizations suggests that an infant is exploiting physiological constraints of the sound-generating system for articulatory development during vocal exploration. These results lend support to the notion that the laryngeal articulator is the principal articulator that infants 1st start to control as they test and practice their phonetic production skills from birth through the 1st several months of life.

Articulatory Uniformity Through Articulatory Reuse: insights from an Ultrasound Study of Sūzhōu Chinese

Author(s): Faytak, Matthew Donald | Advisor(s): Johnson, Keith A | Abstract: This thesis explores the role of uniformity of speech articulation in shaping phonological systems of contrast and their phonetic implementations. The observable effect of uniformity for an individual speaker is that a given phonological primitive (such as a distinctive feature value or gesture, depending on one's theoretical framework) tends to be implemented with maximum articulatory similarity across the speech sounds sharing that primitive. Although less discussed than other organizing principles in substance-based phonology such as phonetic dispersion (Liljencrants and Lindblom, 1972), focalization due to quantal effects (Stevens and Keyser, 1989; Schwartz et al., 1997b), or articulatory ease (Martinet, 1955; Lindblom, 1990), uniformity has been observed in a range of the world's languages, mainly in the timing of laryngeal articulations in stop inventories (Keating, 2003; Chodroff and Wilson, 2017) but also in place-of-articulation primitives (Maddieson, 1996; Chodroff, 2017).However, uniformity has typically been formulated as a purely linguistic constraint. A primary aim of this dissertation is to motivate uniformity as emerging from domain-general biases that shape complex systems of goal-oriented action more broadly, thereby shedding light on the substantive basis and structure of phonological systems. To this end, I describe a model in which articulatory uniformity emerges from articulatory reuse during learning. During the language acquisition process, a learner's internal model (mapping the effects of motor controls applied to the speech articulators to their outcomes) is not yet fully developed. Under these conditions, a model-free learning strategy based on bootstrapping off of the learner's already-mastered skills (exploitation, rather than exploration) may predominate, such that phonological categories whose outputs are perceptually similar may come to be produced with the same articulatory primitives.This thesis tests aspects of the model of uniformity-through-reuse with an experiment on Sūzhōu Chinese, whose fricative vowels are known to somewhat resemble alveolopalatal fricative consonants in their tongue-palate constriction patterns and fricative noise production targets (Ling, 2009). Ultrasound tongue imaging was used to characterize the typical fricative vowel and alveolopalatal fricative consonant productions of 43 Sūzhōu Chinese speakers.Analysis reveals that most Sūzhōu Chinese speakers typically use a single tongue posture uniformly across the fricative vowels and consonants examined, while a minority of speakers deviate from uniformity to an idiosyncratic extent. The extent to which a speaker deviates from a uniform strategy is shown to be unrelated to demographic characteristics and language ability in Sūzhōu Chinese and Standard Chinese. This pattern at the population level suggests that speaker-side factors, such as articulatory reuse, are primarily responsible for shaping the synchronic pool of variation (Ohala, 1989) for this set of Sūzhōu Chinese segments.

Revisiting acoustic correlates of pharyngealization in Jordanian and Moroccan Arabic: Implications for formal representations

This exploratory study of Jordanian and Moroccan Arabic (JA and MA) aims to evaluate whether pharyngealization is associated with an epilaryngeal constriction which causes ‘retraction’ and tense voice quality in surrounding vowels, following the Laryngeal Articulator Model (LAM) (Esling, 2005). Twenty male speakers (10 per dialect) produced vowels preceded by /d or dˤ/. Thirteen acoustic correlates obtained at the onset and midpoint were used to assess this type of constriction. A predictive modeling approach was used; starting with Bayesian Generalized Linear Mixed Effects modeling followed by Conditional Random Forest for classification. Vowels in the pharyngealized context were more open (higher F1, Z1-Z0), more back (lower F2, higher Z3-Z2), more compact (lower Z2-Z1), and showed spectral divergence (higher Z3-Z2). Voice quality results showed these vowels to be produced with a tense voice. High classification rates of 93.5% for JA and 91.1% for MA were obtained and variable importance score showed formant-based measures outperform voice quality ones. This suggests pharyngealization has ‘retraction,’ with a back and down gesture, as a primary correlate followed by [+CONSTRICTED GLOTTIS]. The implications of these results provide strong support for LAM, the feature [+CET], and the use of the epilarynx to describe pharyngealization.

Phonation and laryngeal specification in American English voiceless obstruents

This study presents a detailed acoustic analysis of phonation in voiceless obstruents in American English (AE) to investigate the acoustic consequences of the laryngeal timing that has been reported in the literature. The current study examines the appearance of phonation in voiceless obstruents in a corpus of read speech with 37 AE speakers. Linguistic factors such as phrase and word position, stress, and the preceding phoneme are examined and are shown to condition the presence and degree of phonation during the constriction period of stops and fricatives. The amount of phonation present is further analyzed by characterizing where in the constriction interval phonation appears. Carryover phonation (or bleed) from a preceding sonorant is most common for stops, while a trough pattern (phonation that dies out and then begins again before the end of the closure) is more prevalent for fricatives. These acoustic patterns, together with previous reports of laryngeal articulation and air pressure measures, have implications for the representation of laryngeal timing in a gestural phonology framework.

Estimating Vocal Effort from the Aerodynamics of Labial Fricatives: A Feasibility Study

Vocal effort in loud voice is produced with increased subglottal pressure during vowels and increased supraglottal pressure during consonants. In the paper, our main objective is to check whether it was supported by a parallel increase in the airflow resistance of the laryngeal articulator and of the supralaryngeal articulator, here the lips. For this comparison, our choice fell on the fricative consonants, as their production allows perfectly synchronous air pressure and airflow measurements. Also, the calculation of the real instantaneous aerodynamic resistance is possible with fricatives-as it is with vowels-whereas it is not possible with plosives. The present feasibility study on a healthy subject is based on direct subglottal and intraoral pressures and airflow measured for /f/ or /v/ and from the contiguous vowel produced in VCVCV nonsense words at different levels of intensity. The results support that the airflow resistances at the lips and that at the larynx are quite parallel. The airflow resistance at the lips during labial fricative production could provide a good picture of the laryngeal resistance during the production of continuous speech. This suggests clinical applications using both noninvasive inferred measurements of subglottal pressure variation and direct noninferred airflow measurements from more natural speech production tasks.

The Articulatory Function of the Larynx and the Origins of Speech

<p>The ‘laryngeal articulator,’ consisting of the glottal mechanism, the supraglottic tube, the pharyngeal/epiglottal mechanism, and including three levels of folds: the vocal folds, the ventricular folds, and the aryepiglottic folds, is shown to be responsible for the generation of multiple source vibrations and for the complex modification of the pharyngeal resonating chamber that accounts for a wide range of contrastive auditory qualities. These qualities are observed in a surprisingly large number of the languages of the world, both linguistically and paralinguistically, and they account for sounds which have been labeled as ‘pharyngeal,’ as ‘epiglottal,’ and as various phonation types. They reflect an expanding range of what have been known as the ‘states of the glottis’ and which may be more properly termed ‘states of the larynx.’ It has also been observed that infants, in their first months of life, produce a range of qualities, reflecting both phonatory possibilities and stricture types, that can also be attributed to the laryngeal articulator mechanism. Systematic observation of infants’ early speech production reveals that the control of articulatory detail in the pharynx is mastered during the first year of life. Understanding and control of manner of articulation in the pharynx appears to be a prerequisite for expanding articulatory control into the oral vocal tract. Taking the pharynx as a starting point for the ontogenetic learning of the speech production capacity offers fruitful insights into the phylogenetic development of speech.</p>

Penultimate devoicing in Chaha: phonetic enhancement rather than devoicing

Two of the most well-cited phonological processes in Chaha, ‘devoicing’ (i.e., voiceless consonants alternating with voiced counterparts in the penultimate) and degemination, are reinvestigated to provide a uniform account for laryngeal representations in obstruents within the framework of Dimensional Theory (Avery and Idsardi 2001). In this approach, different from Banksira (2000) and O’Bryan and Rose (2004), devoicing is viewed as articulatory enhancement which assigns [stiff] to Glottal Tension, not a process which deletes the underlying specified feature [voice]. This is drawn from Ohala and Ridordan’ (1979) finding that vocal fold vibration resulting from a prolonged constriction (i.e. geminate consonants) is articulatorily effortable; the phonetic change to [tt] from /dd/ is motivated. Furthermore, Vaux’s Law and the special status of /t/ in Chaha are introduced to account for devoicing in Chaha since devoicing applies when the final consonant is either a sonorant or /t/, which is assumed to be not specified for the Laryngeal articulator (Banksira 2000).

Evidence of Return of Function in Patients with Vocal Fold Paresis

Unilateral vocal fold paresis (UVFP) patients were examined over time for achievement of partial or full functional return or no functional return in the extent of arytenoid movement, clarity of laryngeal articulation, maximum phonation time (MPT), and flow. Effects of treatment type and initial laryngeal electromyography (EMG) results were examined. A retrospective chart review was completed for patients a year or less after onset evaluated between April 1999 and December 2005 and treated between 2 and 20 months after onset. Twenty-one individuals were evaluated (11 males, age: 34-89 years) and subsequently treated (10 by injection and 11 by thyroplasty). Evidence of full functional return was found for the extent of arytenoid movement in 25% of individuals, for clarity of laryngeal articulation in 71%, for MPT in 58%, and for flow in 50%. No evidence of functional return was found for the extent of arytenoid movement in 33% of the individuals, for clarity of laryngeal articulation in 8%, for MPT in 32%, and for flow in 22%. All pairs of outcome measures showed poor agreement in the level to which they functionally returned. More individuals with signs of reinnervation demonstrated MPTs with full functional return than expected. Patients with UVFP, even after treatment and at least 12 months postinjury did not demonstrate full functional return for all measures. Differences across measures in the percentage of individuals demonstrating each level of function and the lack of agreement of function level between measures within individuals suggest the need to use multiple outcome measures.

Laryngeal articulations of /x/ in Southern Polish

The present paper offers a summary of the results of two earlier experiments (Nawrocki and Gonet 2004; Nawrocki 2004), in which acoustic properties of the voiceless velar fricative phoneme /x/ in Southern Polish were investigated.
 
 As is found in both studies (Nawrocki and Gonet 2004; Nawrocki 2004), speakers of both genders favour glottal articulation, with partial or full voicing. Word final contexts are decisively in favour of [x]. The word initial, prevocalic positions seem to allow quite a number of allophonic variants of /x/ . These are: [x], [ɦ], [ç] and, additionally, the voiceless glottal, the pharyngeal or the epiglottal [h]/[ħ]/[ʜ]. Another factor taken into account is the coarticulation effect of the vocalic context on the choice of articulation. Based on the results of the experiments, a reformulated allophonic composition is proposed for Polish /x/. It makes room for previously unconsidered pharyngeal and glottal allophones.
 
 In order to inspect the acoustic properties of the allophones of Polish /x/ further, their static and dynamic spectral features are compared to those of phonetically similar sounds in other languages where they have the status of independent phonemes. Special attention is paid to the distribution of spectral peaks and their intensity. The fact that in Polish there are no 'back' fricative phonemes that would contrast with /x/ creates a wide range of acceptable allophonic articulations that cannot be challenged from either articulatory or perceptual points of view.

Acoustic differences according to the epileptic focus in benign partial epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes patients

Purpose : The aim of this study was to investigate the speech problems in benign rolandic epilepsy (BRE) according to the seizure focus in EEG and semiology. Methods : Twenty three patients [right origin (13 patients) or left side (10 patients)] who met the BRE criteria by International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE) were prospectively enrolled. We excluded the patients who had abnormal MRI or showed both side spikes in EEG. Computerized Speech Lab was used to assess the speech characteristics of the patients. Results : The error pattern of laryngeal articulation in BRE was exclusively substitution of stop consonants, these errors showed more frequent in the left group (16.0% vs 25.5%). Voice onset time (VOT) of stop consonants and Total duration (TD) of word in both groups were prolonged than normal control group, especially in left group (P0.05). Duration of counting (5 to 9) in left group slower than right group (8.6±1.7 vs 7.9±1.8 sec). Conclusion : Our data suggested that interictal spikes and seizures in either centrotemporal sides, especially left side group, may induce speech problems. We recommend the logopedic and phoniatricevaluations of speech in BRE patients.

The valves of the throat and their functioning in tone, vocal register and stress: laryngoscopic case studies

The standard method of describing phonation for tone, vocal register, stress and other linguistic categories relies on the ‘continuum hypothesis’ that linguistic sounds are produced by means of glottal states determined by the aperture between the arytenoid cartilages, the endpoints of the voiceless–voiced continuum being ‘open glottis’ and ‘closed glottis’. This paper takes a different view, pointing out that many languages make use of a number of valves, and that these valves are not articulations on a glottal continuum but represent a synergistic and hierarchical system of laryngeal articulations. These valves constitute a principal source of phonological contrast, with an influence on how oral articulatory events are characterised.

There Are No Back Vowels: The Larygeal Articulator Model

AbstractAs an alternative to the high-low-front-back model of vowel specification, thelaryngeal articulator modelis proposed, based on a reinterpretation of how the vocal tract functions to produce laryngeal and pharyngeal sounds. Evidence drawn from numerous laryngoscopic studies demonstrates the scope of articulatory behaviours possible in the pharynx. For a broad sample of languages, lingual retraction is shown to accompany laryngeal/pharyngeal gestures, motivating the redistribution of vowel quality designations. The vocal tract is divided into two articulatory components: the laryngeal articulator and the oral articulator. The vowel chart is split into three sectors: front, raised, and retracted. Whereas front vowels can be qualified as close or open, so-called back vowels are re-designated as either raised or retracted, and the role of retraction as a function of the laryngeal constrictor mechanism is elaborated.

Glottal stop, glottalized resonants, and pharyngeals: A reinterpretation with evidence from a laryngoscopic study of Nuuchahnulth (Nootka)

The articulatory mechanisms involved in the production of glottal stop, glottalized resonants, and pharyngeals are examined laryngoscopically in the Wakashan language, Nuuchahnulth (Ahousaht dialect). Early linguistic descriptions and historical definitions suggested that a glottal stop is a component of the glottalized resonant series and perhaps of the pharyngeal /ʕ/; however, it has been unclear where and to what degree an occlusion can be found in the production of these sounds. To address the theoretical issue of the phonetic relationship between glottal, pharyngeal, and epiglottal articulations, we use the sounds of Nuuchahnulth and of other languages we have observed in formulating a revised theory of cardinal categories of pharyngeal and laryngeal articulations. We present direct visual evidence that the initial voiced glottalized resonant consonants of Nuuchahnulth are a product of the addition of a moderate glottal stop occurring before the resonant and that the pharyngeal /ʕ/ contains a voiceless epiglottal stop followed by a voiced pharyngeal approximant. Our evidence suggests that pharyngeals /ʕ/ and /ħ/ are not only lingually retracted but are primarily a function of an aryepiglottic laryngeal constriction mechanism. Measurements of the duration of articulatory events confirm that glottalized resonants are almost twice the length of nonglottalized segments. We also find that the pharyngeals /ʕ/ and /ħ/ involve an even longer articulatory sequence than glottalized consonants, most likely as a function of the greater distance which the articulators have to travel. These findings imply a revised interpretation of the relationship of glottals to pharyngeals in articulatory theory, including the conceptualization of how constriction occurs in the larynx and in the pharynx and the rank ordering of strictures proposed within taxonomic theory.

Acoustic effects of carbamazepine in benign rolandic epilepsy

Subtle specific interference with language function has been suspected in benign rolandic epilepsy (BRE) because of the location of the seizure focus. The aim of this study was to investigate the language and speech problems in BRE and the changes after medication with carbamazepine. Benign rolandic epilepsy patients (n=11) who met ILAE criteria were assessed for standardized full articulation. Speech problems were present in BRE patients and worsened after medication. The error pattern of laryngeal articulation in BRE was exclusively the substitution of stop consonants, and these errors increased after medication (6% vs 13%). In this study, the variation in acoustic parameters after carbamazepine was similar to the hypokinetic pattern of articulation abnormalities. Our findings suggest that BRE patients treated with carbamazepine should be monitored for language and speech problems.

How the pharyngeal resonator is controlled articulatorily

Indigenous languages of North America, especially west coast Vancouver Island Nuuchahnulth and Interior BC Salish, illustrate an extensive range of use of the pharyngeal resonator. The pharynx is classified as part of the laryngeal articulator (rather than lingual) because the laryngeal constrictor mechanism (controlling changes from the glottis to the aryepiglottic folds) is the principal articulator whose movements determine the shape of the pharynx. The Nuuchahnulth (Nootka) dialects (e.g., Ahousaht) and Thompson, Moses-Columbia, and Spokane/Kalispel Salish varieties all close the larynx completely for the speech sound epiglottal stop. With the airway optimally shut, the pharynx is small; the aryepiglottic folds are pressed against the epiglottic tubercle, the tongue is retracted, and the larynx is raised. There are good indications that the thyroarytenoid, aryepiglottic, thyroepiglottic, hyoglossus and hyothyroid muscles participate in this buckling maneuvre. These languages also contain either a pharyngeal fricative or approximant (at the same place of articulation but with less stricture) and, in Thompson, also pharyngealized uvulars (with even less stricture). Pharyngeal resonance in all of these cases is dependent initially on the shortening of the supraglottic tube and subsequently on the combined effect of tongue retraction and larynx raising reducing the volume immediately above the supraglottic tube.