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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton October 4, 2007

Voice Register in Khmu’: Experiments in Production and Perception

  • Arthur S. Abramson , Patrick W. Nye and Theraphan Luangthongkum
From the journal Phonetica

Abstract

Some Khmu’ dialects have phonologically distinctive voice registers.Auditory observations have claimed a stable distinction between clear voice andhigh pitch for Register 1 and breathy voice and low pitch for Register 2 in theKhmu’ Rawk dialect of northern Thailand. Word pairs distinguished only by registerwere recorded by 25 native speakers. Acoustic analysis yielded F0 and overallamplitude contours, frequencies of F1 and F2 in quasi-steady states of the vowels,relative intensities of higher harmonics to that of the first harmonic, and voweldurations. When circumstances caused early attention to perception testing, thewords of only 8 speakers had been analyzed for properties other than amplitudeand F0. Since the only significant factor that had emerged by then was F0 contour,the synthetic stimuli were made with just a series of seven contours. The labelingby 32 native speakers yielded two categories, demonstrating the sufficiency of F0as an acoustic cue. The completed acoustic analysis showed a significant effect ofone of the harmonic ratios for the women only, suggesting a conservative bias.The language has been shifting toward tonality and may have reached it.


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Received: 2007-02-17
Accepted: 2007-06-09
Published Online: 2007-10-04
Published in Print: 2007-08-01

© 2007 S. Karger AG, Basel

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