Prosodic Effects on Tonal Perturbation and Voice Quality in Taiwanese
Date Issued
2008
Date
2008
Author(s)
Tung, Hung-Chun
Abstract
Many studies have observed that several articulatory gestures in speech production and their acoustic output tended to be strengthened at prosodically prominent positions; however, the relationship of tonal perturbation of stop consonants and the voice quality with the prosodic hierarchy have not been explored yet. The current study aims to investigate the prosodic domain strengthening effect in the tonal perturbation of stop consonants and the relationship between prosody and voice quality in Taiwanese. Three native Taiwanese speakers, HZM, WHX, and ZZJ participated in the recording of this study. The target syllables carried high-level, high-falling, low-falling, rising, and mid-level tones, with voiced, voiceless aspirated, and voiceless unaspirated stops as the onset consonant. The target syllables were located at the initial position of utterance, intonational-phrase, small-phrase, word, and syllable. The fundamental frequency (F0), the differences in the amplitude between the first harmonic (H1) and the second harmonic (H2) (H1 - H2), between the first harmonic and the harmonic closest to F1 (H1- A1), between the first harmonic and the harmonic closest to F2 (H1- A2), and between the first harmonic and the harmonic closest to F3 (H1 - A3) were measured at the 5% time point of target syllables, and at the 95% time point of the syllable immediately preceding target syllables. Results on the tonal perturbation show that the prosodic domain strengthening effect on tonal perturbation was not significant, which might be attributed to the fact that Taiwanese is a tonal language. If the tonal perturbation were strengthened, it is possible for listener to process the linguistic input with difficulty. On the other hand, H1 - A1 and H1- A2 at the 95% time point of the syllable immediately preceding target syllables increased as the prosodic boundaries became stronger, i.e., the voice quality became breathier at the final of prosodic domains when the prosodic domain was larger. As for the voice quality at the 5% time point of target syllables, the three speakers did not show any obvious change in voice quality in terms of the prosodic hierarchy. The study is the first study to investigate whether tonal perturbations would be strengthened at the boundary of larger prosodic constituents. Our study shows a contrastive results with Jun (1996), where atonal languages such as Korean, French, and English. We might postulate that domain-initial strengthening effect is language-specific or specific to some speech articulatory gestures. Concerning the voice quality, we found that H1- A1 and H1- A2 were successful indicators for the voice quality change in Taiwanese, which is similar with the Esposito (2007)''s findings in Fuzhou dialect.
Subjects
Taiwanese
tonal perturbation
prosody
voice quality
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