Volume 46, Issue 1-3

This paper presents an acoustic and physiological analysis of the Danish ‘stød’ with an introduction on its phonological role and distribution. The stød is a prosodic feature bound to definite syllables in certain word types and connected to the latter part of the syllable. Phonetically it is a phonation type related to creaky voice. The first part of the syllable is characterized acoustically by a higher pitch level and often a higher intensity level than syllables without stød, and by a relatively high subglottal pressure and airflow, thus generally by a relatively high expenditure of energy. In the second part, the stød phase proper, there is a considerable decrease in intensity, particularly in the lower part of the spectrum and, for the majority of the speakers, a noticeable decrease in fundamental frequency, and/or aperiodicity. Moreover the airflow is low, and inverse filtering shows a longer closure time in each vibration. There is also a slight decrease in subglottal pressure, and all speakers have a constriction of the vocal folds and often of the ventricular folds as well, but with large interindividual variation as to the degree of constriction. On the boundary between the first and the second phase most speakers have a strong contraction of the vocalis and lateralis muscles, obviously preparing for the glottal constriction of the second phase. The author cannot follow Svend Smith in concluding that a sudden contraction and relaxation of the respiratory muscles resulting in a quick rise and fall in subglottal pressure constitutes the primary factor. There is, rather, an independent contraction of a number of muscles, and neither the high pitch at the beginning nor the fall in pitch and intensity in the second phase can be explained by the subglottal pressure contour. The high pitch level at the beginning may be explained by activity in the cricothyroid, and the decrease in pitch and the low intensity in the second phase is probably due to constriction of the glottis, although the fact that the decrease in intensity starts rather early raises some problems. Finally the question of the origin of the stød is discussed briefly. It is suggested that the stød in Danish perhaps originated from a reinforcement of the first syllable in combination with reduction and loss of a following syllable in Common Scandinavian. The reinforcement may have been accompanied by a rise in pitch, so that developments in different directions (involving stød or tonal accents) were possible.

In this paper, tonogenesis in the four languages Northern Kammu, Blang, Hu and U is analyzed. For comparison, register development in Lamet is treated as well. All these languages belong to the Palaungic and Kammuic branches of the Mon-Khmer division of the Austroasiatic language family and are fairly closely related, but they have developed tone or register systems independently of each other. These developments can be explained by universal microprosodic properties of segments, which are used in different ways by the different languages. Tone (or register) development is connected with merger of voiced and voiceless initial consonants in Kammu, Blang and Lamet, with merger of long and short vowels in Hu, and with merger of long and short vowels combined with both initial and final consonant changes and vowel quality changes in U. Thus, the range of microprosodic properties used for tonogenesis is extremely wide in this language group.

Sequences of the form V₁bV₂bV₁ were recorded by a male speaker. From each sequence, three types of stimuli were edited out: (1) the medial vowel, from after the burst of the preceding stop to the start of the closure of the following stop; (2) the quasi-steady state of the medial vowel, and (3) the transitions alone of the medial vowel (complement to 2). The perception of each type of stimulus was examined in separate tests and the results were compared. For two of the three contexts (V₁ = /i/, /u/), scores for stimuli of the third condition (transitions) were as high as for the first (control) condition, supporting the importance of transitions as cues for vowel identity. For the third context (/a/), however, performance was significantly lower, thus suggesting an influence of vowel context on the contribution of transitions to vowel identification.

The dynamic theory of vowel perception emphasizes the importance of the consonant transitions in CVC syllables to the identification of the vowel itself. However, the dynamic theory is relatively vague in terms of what perceptual processes may be involved and it says nothing about the role of auditory and/or phonetic memory for such ‘dynamic events’. The present study created three synthetic [É­]-[ε] continua consisting of a [b Vb] full-syllable continuum, a silent-center continuum (which had over 72% of the medial vowel replaced by silence) and an isolated vowel continuum to specifically examine (1) the use of auditory and phonetic memory for dynamic acoustic cues and (2) the ability of listeners to track the trajectories of very brief formant transitions. Experiment 1 demonstrated that there were no significant differences among the three continua in terms of listener identifications but that the silent-center tokens demonstrated significantly lower within-category discriminations, perhaps because of degraded auditory representation. Experiment 2 required listeners to make cross-continuum vowel discriminations and showed that some degree of acoustic similarity was important – listeners were particularly poor at discriminating between the silent-center and vowel-only tokens. This suggests that listeners were not able to make discriminations on the basis of abstract vowel labels alone. Experiment 3 demonstrated that listeners could make quite accurate vowel identifications even when as little as 1 pitch period of acoustic energy signaled the consonant transitions in the silent-center tokens. Experiment 4 showed that listeners’ identifications of the silent-center stimuli were based on the formant changes in the transitions rather than their endpoint frequencies.

The purpose of this investigation is to shed some more light on the conflicting views about a number of acoustic parameters which might carry information on some general somatic features of the speaker. In an experiment, average fundamental frequency (F₀) values of 105 male and 78 female adult subjects were correlated with their individual height and weight data. No significant correlations between acoustic and physical parameters were found. The results are discussed with respect to earlier studies with completely different approaches to the issue, namely direct estimation of physical traits from the speech signal by listeners.