Cricothyroid Activity and Control of Voicing in Hindi Stops and Affricates

Abstract

Simultaneous recordings of voice and cricothyroid activity during speech gestures by one speaker of Hindi were made. The experimental utterances consisted of monosyllabic and bisyllabic meaningful and nonsense words containing in prestressed initial and medial and poststressed final positions the voiced and unvoiced stops and affricates from both the aspirated and unaspirated categories. All of the words were embedded in the carrier sentence ‘baba – ap boliye’. The results show markedly higher levels of cricothyroid activity for the unvoiced stops and affricates than for their voiced cognates. This cricothyroid activity appears to facilitate voicelessness through increased fold tension during unvoiced stops and affricates and thus contributes to the execution of voicing distinction in voiced and unvoiced stops and affricates. Fundamental frequency data obtained on precisely the utterances reported in this paper also seem to fit the hypothesis that unvoiced stops and affricates have higher fold tension than voiced stops and affricates.