perception of glottalization in varying pitch contexts

Institute of Acoustics and Speech Communication, Chair of System Theory and Speech Technology Department of Speech, Music & Hearing

Perception of Glottalization in Varying Pitch Contexts Across LanguagesMaria Paola Bissiri, Margaret Zellers

maria_paola.bissiri@tu-dresden.de, zellers@kth.se

1 Association of glottalization and pitch

• Glottalization often associated with low pitch in intonationallanguages

Figure 1: Glottalization: F0 lowering, damping and aperiod-icity [1] (“only on the” by native German femalespeaker).

• However, glottalization also associated to high tones in manytone languages [2, 3] and even in intonation languages [4, 1]

2 AXB listening experiment

2.1 Creation of modal and glottalized stimuli

naturally produced in modal and glottalized version.

Final contour = mid

Final contour = rise

Final contour = fall

Initial contour = mid

Initial contour = rise

Initial contour = fall

220 Hz

+3 st

-3 st

Figure 2: Schematic of possible pitch contours.

Figure 3: Spectrogram of /na/ sequence with a) pitch points at35, 220, 35 and 220 Hz added in the transition and b)glottalization spliced into final syllable.

2.2 Procedure of AXB experiment

Figure 4: User interface of AXB listening test (Praat) of 17-20min. duration and schematic of experiment.

2.3 German, English and Swedish listeners

N=35, N=13, and N=14

German English Swedish

Correct responses to control comparisons

% o

f cor

rect

res

pons

es0

1020

3040

5060

70

< 90 90−94.9 95−99 100

5 5

12 13

01

6 6

10

8

5

Figure 5: Required accuracy 90%, counts on bars.

3 Results of test comparisons

Fall Mid Rise

Fall vs Mid

Initial contour

% o

f res

pons

es0

2040

6080

100

Fall Mid Rise

Fall vs Rise

Initial contour

% o

f res

pons

es0

2040

6080

100

Fall Mid Rise

Mid vs Rise

Initial contour

% o

f res

pons

es0

2040

6080

100

Fall Mid Rise

Figure 6: Responses by all listeners when they had to choosebetween a) a falling and a mid, b) a falling and a rising,and c) a mid and a rising contour.

Fall Mid RiseInitial contour

% o

f res

pons

es0

2040

6080

100 German (p < 0.05*)

Fall Mid RiseInitial contour

% o

f res

pons

es0

2040

6080

100 English (p < 0.05*)

Fall Mid RiseInitial contour

% o

f res

pons

es0

2040

6080

100 Swedish (n.s.*)

Fall Mid

Figure 7: Responses by German, English and Swedish listen-ers when they had to choose between a falling and amid contour (* Pearson’s χ2 test).

4 Discussion: Hypothesis A and

influence of initial pitch

5 Conclusions

References[1] Redi, L. and Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. (2001). Variation in the realization of glottalization

in normal speakers, Journal of Phonetics 29: 407-429.

[2] Gordon, M. and Ladefoged, P. (2001). Phonation types: a cross- linguistic overview.Journal of Phonetics 29: 383-406.

[3] Gussenhoven, C. (2004). The phonology of tone and intonation. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press.

[4] Pierrehumbert, J. and Talkin, D. (1992). Lenition of /h/ and glottal stop. In Papers inLaboratory Phonology II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 90-117.

[5] Zellers, M. and Post, B. (2010). Aperiodicity at topic structure boundaries. In Proceed-ings of Speech Prosody 2010, Chicago, USA.

[6] Ogden, R. (2003). Voice quality as a resource for the management of turn-taking inFinnish talk-in-interaction. In Proceedings of 15th Intern. Congress of Phonetic Sci-ences, Barcelona, Spain.

[7] Bissiri, M.P., Lecumberri, M.L., Cooke, M., and Volín, J. (2011). The role of word-initial glottal stops in recognizing English words. Proceedings of Interspeech 2011,Florence, Italy, pp. 165-168.

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This research was supported by a Marie Curie Intra European Fellowship within the 7th European Community Framework Programme and by a postdoctoral research grant from the Swedish Science Foundation (Vetenskapsrådet).