Volume 32, Issue 1

Some precisions concerning the specification and the instruments developed for the measurement of laryngeal frequency F1 being stated, the authors give statistical results for French. In first approximation, the F1 distribution is gaussian for a given corpus; the standard deviation measured and given in percentage referring to the mean laryngeal frequency F1 is about 16% for male and female speakers. Ceteris partibus, the variations of F1 are relatively low for a given speaker from one record to an other (about ± ½ tone). The means of F1 are given for samples (gaussian) concerning adults (30 males and 30 female): respectively 118 and 207 Hz with standard deviation σ (F1) of 18 and 20 Hz. The ratio ?1 of the voiced duration to the total duration of the corpus, dependant on the sex: 0.50 for men and 0.63 for women (the difference is significant at the 0.001 level) allows the specification of the speaking rate. When the speaking rate increases, the length of pauses decreases. These results can be used for an estimation of the precision of the statistical measurement of F1 and σ (F1), in relation to the number of periods N. To N appears a total duration of the corpus determined by ?1. A comparison is made between the results of the calculation and the measurement. The F1 specification can be used for determination of the vocal source of synthesizer to improve naturalness of synthetic sounds and for analysis and synthesis of prosodic features using the results of two previous papers which have allowed to specify the position of level 1 2 and 4 and to show the differences in the perceptual importance of the variations introduced in connection with the three levels.

This paper investigates the linguistic consequences of the post-World War II relocation of low-German speaking Pomeranians in the west. These speakers have been under the influence of three language norms; those of standard German, of Pomeranian low-German, and of Schleswig-Holstein low-German for 25 years. The study shows that the Pomeranian dialect has not been retained to the same extent by all speakers, and moreover, that the variable proficiency does not correlate with age, even though it is often assumed that older speakers necessarily speak a ‘purer’ dialect, but rather it correlates with social factors and structural factors of the dialect. As regards the structural factors, it is shown that reinforcement, i.e. the agreement of the Pomeranian dialect form with that of standard German or Holstein low-German, is significant. Eleven phonological traits of the Pomeranian dialect are studied in the speech of twelve migrated speakers.

The hypothesis that intrinsic duration of vowels correlated with tongue height is dependent on the extent of the articulatory movements is refuted. If one chooses vowels in a consonantal environment which allow far-reaching co-articulation (vowels between bilabial consonants) the phenomenon of intrinsic duration still remains. The same is valid for whispered vowels. The phenomenon of intrinsic pitch is confirmed. The author establishes the hypothesis that intrinsic duration and intrinsic pitch of vowels are a matter of compensation conditioned by different resonance factors of the vocal tract when high and low vowels are produced.

Electromyographic techniques were employed to discover which, if any, intrinsic and extrinsic tongue muscles displayed a difference in overall amount of activity corresponding to the traditional tense-lax distinction between members of the English vowel pairs /i - Ị/, /e - ε/, and /u - û/. Although some muscles revealed a consistent difference, most did not. Even for those muscles where a tense-lax difference was found, the data do not support the notion that tension was a necessary or sufficient differentia of production.