While all languages of the world use modal phonation, many also rely
on other phonation types such as breathy or creaky voice. For example,
Gujarati, an Indo-Aryan language, makes a distinction between breathy
and modal phonation among consonants and vowels: /bɦaɾ/
‘burden’, /baɾ/ ‘twelve’, and /ba̤ɾ/
‘outside’ [1, 2]. This study, which is a replication and
an extension of Khan [3], aims to determine the acoustic and articulatory
parameters that distinguish breathy and modal vowels. The participants
of this study are heritage and native Gujarati speakers.
The materials consisted
of 40 target words with the modal and breathy pairs of the three vowel
qualities: /a/ vs /a̤/, /e/ vs /e̤/, and /o/ vs /o̤/.
The participants uttered the words in the context of a sentence. Acoustic
measurements such as H1-H2, H1-A1, harmonic-to-noise ratio and articulatory
measurements such as contact quotient were calculated throughout the
vowel duration.
The results of the Smoothing Spline ANOVA analyses indicated that
measures such as H1-A1, harmonic to noise ratio, and contact quotient
distinguished modal and breathy vowels for native speakers. Heritage
speakers also had a contrast between breathy and modal vowels, however
the contrast is not as robust as that of native speakers.
Cite as: Nara, K. (2017) Acoustic and Electroglottographic Study of Breathy and Modal Vowels as Produced by Heritage and Native Gujarati Speakers. Proc. Interspeech 2017, 1054-1058, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1774
@inproceedings{nara17_interspeech,
author={Kiranpreet Nara},
title={{Acoustic and Electroglottographic Study of Breathy and Modal Vowels as Produced by Heritage and Native Gujarati Speakers}},
year=2017,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2017},
pages={1054--1058},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1774}
}