TONE DISTRIBUTION AND ITS EFFECT ON SUBGLOTTAL PRESSURE DURING SPEECH

Helen M. Hanson1, Janet Slifka1, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel1 & James Kobler2
1MIT; 2Massachusetts General Hospital

ID 1291
[full paper]

The current work is part of a project to characterize the subglottal pressure (Ps) contour in terms of the distribution of pitch accents and of phrase and boundary tones. Declination of the working phase, and the transition from the working phase to the termination phase are studied. It is found that the nuclear pitch accent does not define the start of the termination phase; the utterance offset is a better marker. Declination rate of the working phase and its relation to the phrase and boundary tones at utterance offset are found to vary among speakers. These differences could result in variations in SPL and F0 that contribute to a speaker's individuality. The results have implications for models of speech production, and for applications such as computer speech synthesis and recognition.