Events Calendar

How Voice Quality Works Articulatorily

Speaker: John H. Esling,Professor Emeritus , Department of Linguistics, University of Victoria

Talk Title: How Voice Quality Works Articulatorily

Abstract: The Laryngeal Articulator Model is a novel phonetic view of the vocal tract and the foundation for a revised theory of voice quality. The vocal folds, ventricular folds, aryepiglottic folds, epilaryngeal tube, and larynx height have been shown to be responsible for the generation of multiple types of periodic vibration and complex modification of the pharyngeal resonating chamber, accounting for a wide range of contrastive auditory qualities in the languages of the world. Instrumental phonetic images, drawn from laryngoscopy, ultrasound, and cineradiography illustrate states of the larynx, phonation types, and linguistic exemplars from a range of language families, and measurements leading to multimedia 3D modelling of the larynx within the vocal tract are presented. Canonical voice quality categories are illustrated auditorily with videos of well-known speakers and musical performers.

The model has implications for theories of speech acquisition and sound change. The Laryngeal Articulator is the principal mechanism that infants first learn to control as they test and practice their phonetic production skills from birth through the first several months of life. The auditor acoustic cues generated in the pharynx in the wide range of languages we have observed experimentally are the same elements of sound production observed in early infancy. The infant vocalization data illustrate that laryngeal quality is primal, that control of the articulatory and acoustic cues of speech originate in the pharynx, and that the acquisition of the ability to produce manners of articulation spreads from the pharynx in a process that parallels and complements the ability of infants to discriminate speech-sound categories perceptually. Laryngeal coarticulation is shown to be an endemic element of speech acquisition. Implications extend to the re-evaluation of how the human speech capacity evolved and to the modelling of speech.


Host: Prof. Shirkanth Narayanan

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Talyia White