FRIDAY MORNING, 20 MAY 2005 REGENCY E, 8:30 A.M. TO 12:00 ...

5pSC26. Voice F0 responses elicited by perturbations in pitch of
auditory feedback during English speech and sustained vowels. Jay
J. Bauer Dept. of Commun. Sci. & Disord., Univ. of Wisconsin–
Milwaukee, P.O. Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53201, jbauer@uwm.edu and
Charles R. Larson Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL 60208
Twenty-one native speakers of American English were asked to repeatedly
inflect the pitch of either the first or second syllable of an English
speech phrase or produce non-word sustained vowels while listening to
amplified auditory feedback. Brief upward and downward perturbations in
pitch of auditory feedback were introduced in real time shortly after vocal
onset. Resultant changes in voice F0 due to perturbations in pitch were
compared across vocal conditions and perturbation direction. Data indicated
that auditory feedback was used in real-time to stabilize voice F0
during both normal English speech and sustained vowels. Incomplete
compensatory corrections in voice F0 due to the perturbations in pitch of
auditory feedback were prevalent during both dynamic speech gain:
12.7% and static sustained vowel phonations gain: 19.3%, and appear
to be regulated by similar corrective mechanisms. However during
dynamic speech, voice F0 was modulated across syllable boundaries in a
task-dependent manner according to syllable pitch inflection. Thus, voice
F0 responses appear to help maintain the underlying suprasegmental
meaning of a speech phrase by delaying the onset of the voice F0 response
to coincide with the pitch-inflected syllable. Work supported by
NIH Grant No. F31 DC005874.
5pSC29. Vowel production and perception in French blind and
sighted adults. Sophie Dupont and Lucie Menard Universite du
Province Quebec a Montreal, Departement de linguistique, CP 8888, succ.
Centre-Ville, Montreal, Canada H3C 3P8, menard.lucie@uqam.ca
It is well known that visual cues play an important role in speech
perception and production. Early in life, blind speakers, who do not have
access to visual information related to lip and jaw movements, show a
delay in the acquisition of phonological contrasts based on these visible
articulatory features A. E. Mills, Hearing by eye: The psychology of
lip-reading, pp. 145–161 1987. It has also been claimed that blind
speakers have better auditory discrimination abilities than sighted speakers.
The goal of this study is to describe the production-perception relationships
involved in French vowels for blind and sighted speakers. Six
blind adults and six sighted adults served as subjects. The auditory abilities
of each subject were evaluated by auditory discrimination tests
AXB. At the production level, ten repetitions of the ten French oral
vowels were recorded. Formant values and fundamental frequency values
were extracted from the acoustic signal. Measures of contrasts Euclidean
distances and dispersion standard deviations were computed and compared
for each feature height, place, roundedness and group blind,
sighted. Regression analyses between discrimination scores and produced
contrasts were carried out. Despite between-speaker variability, results
show an effect of speakers group blind versus sighted on the produced
contrast distances.
5pSC27. The perception of speech rhythm: An investigation of inter
and intra rhythmic class variability using delexicalized stimuli.
Volker Dellwo Dept. of Phonet. and Linguist., University College
London, 4 Stephenson Way, London NW1 2HE, UK and Petra Wagner
Universitaet Bonn, D-53115 Bonn, Germany
It has been demonstrated that stress- and syllable-timed languages are
differentiable in terms of parameters based on vocalic and consonantal
interval durations, and that stress-timed languages are more variable in
terms of these parameters. There is also significant between- and withinsubject
variability on these parameters, but it is unclear whether this production
variability is perceptually salient in terms of rhythm. This issue
was investigated in a series of experiments using delexicalized stimuli, in
which the vocalic intervals were substituted by sinusoidal tones and the
consonantal intervals by white noise. Subjects were asked to classify the
stimuli according to the regularity of the tone sequences. The results thus
far indicate that intra rhythm class variation, as measured by consonantal
and vocalic interval duration variation, can be well perceived.
5pSC28. Palato-lingual contact patterns during Korean obstruent
production; lax, aspirated and forced. Hirohide Yoshioka and Kim
Soone Inst. of Human Sci., Univ. of Tsukuba, Japan
In Korean obstruents, there is a three-way distinction in manner of
articulation; lax, aspirated and forced. The present study is to investigate
the temporal and spatial details of tongue contacts with the hard palate
during these three types of consonant production. The subject, a 30-yearold
female of the Seoul dialect was instructed to read a set of various
words beginning with these consonants, embedded in a frame sentence
i-geo-/Cal/-ita (Cconsonant). The palato-lingual contact patterns were
recorded using dynamic electro-palatography. The results show that the
area and duration of the palato-lingual contact are clearly different among
these three types of consonants. As for stops, the palato-lingual contact is
wider and longer in the forced stop production. In the affricate production,
the patterns of the maximum contact area and the duration are as follows:
wide and long in the forced type, middle in the aspirated, and narrow and
short in the lax. These data strongly suggest that the temporal and spatial
details of the palato-longual contact may play an important role in manifesting
the Korean three-way distinction, together with other articulatory
adjustments, such as laryngeal and respiratory controls.
5pSC30. The role of intonational phrasing in the elicitation of speech
errors. Marianne Pouplier TAAL, Univ. of Edinburgh, UK and Haskins
Labs, New Haven, CT, pouplier@ling.ed.ac.uk, Mark Tiede Haskins
Labs, New Haven, CT, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel MIT R.L.E.,
Cambridge, MA, Man Gao, and Louis Goldstein Yale Univ., New
Haven, CT
Recent work has proposed that some speech errors arise from an underlying
coordination process in speech production in which gestures can
assume grammatically illegal but dynamically stable coordination modes.
The general premise is that shared gestural structure within a prosodic
domain sets up the conditions under which stable coordination modes
spontaneously emerge and produce errors. If certain gestures e.g., coda
consonants recur every word but others recur less frequently e.g., alternating
initial consonants, the lower frequency gestures will increase in
occurrence, resulting in gestural intrusion errors. This suggests that manipulation
of the rhythmic domain through intonational phrasing should
determine error patterns differentially. Since the gestural coupling which
lies at the heart of the rhythmic synchronization approach takes time to
establish, it is predicted that continuous repetitions of e.g. ‘‘cop tap tube
cub’’ will lead to a maximum buildup of coupling strength and thus the
most errors. If however phrasal grouping is imposed, as in ‘‘cop tap, tube
cub,’’ fewer errors are hypothesized to occur. We test these predictions by
having subjects repeat the same word string in different prosodic grouping
conditions. Our initial results confirm that the more alternating consonants
an intonational phrase contains, the more errors occur.
5pSC31. Effect of aspiration noise and spectral slope on perceived
breathiness in vowels. Rahul Shrivastav and Maria Pinero Dept. of
Comm. Sci. & Disord., Univ. of Florida, 336 Dauer Hall, Gainesville, FL
32611
Breathy voice quality is frequently encountered in both normal and
dysphonic voices. Breathiness has been associated with an increase in the
intensity of aspiration noise as well as changes in spectral slope Childers
and Ahn, 1995; Fischer-Jorgenson, 1967; Huffman, 1987; Klatt and Klatt,
1990. Shrivastav and Sapienza 2003 found that subjective ratings of
breathiness obtained from a group of listeners were highly correlated with
certain measures calculated from the auditory spectrum of the vocal acoustic
signal. One of these measures, the partial loudness of the harmonic
energy, was related to both the aspiration noise and the spectral slope of
the voices. In the present experiment, 10 young adult listeners with normal
2622 J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 117, No. 4, Pt. 2, April 2005 149th Meeting: Acoustical Society of America 2622