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Throaty speech sounds like glottal stops, creaky voice, and epiglottal stops are phonemic speech sounds found in various languages cross-linguistically, yet voice and speech literature has historically associated such sounds with poor vocal technique, vocal misuse, and/or vocal abuse. Currently, there is no clear evidence to support the notion that speech sounds which serve as realizations of phonemes in one language are unhealthy when used prosodically in another. Speech sounds targeted (both historically and contemporarily) for reduction and removal from speech patterns for supposed health concerns in English-speaking voice training tend to be the same speech sounds which are targeted as socially undesirable compared with standardized accents of English. Critical examination of cross-linguistic evidence, social context, and previous historical assumptions are necessary to challenge the classification of a speech sound as poor technique or vocal misuse/abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a detailed examination of voice quality in word-final vowels in Spanish. The experimental task involved the pronunciation of words in two prosodic contexts by native Spanish speakers from diverse dialects. A total of 400 vowels (10 participants × 10 words × 2 contexts × 2 repetitions) were analyzed acoustically in Praat. Waveforms and spectrograms were inspected visually for voice, creak, breathy voice, and devoicing cues. In addition, the relative amplitude difference between the first two harmonics (H1–H2) was obtained via FFT spectra. The findings reveal that while creaky voice is pervasive, breathy voice is also common, and devoicing occurs in 11% of tokens. We identify multiple phonation types (up to three) within the same vowel, of which modal voice followed by breathy voice was the most common combination. While creaky voice was more frequent overall for males, modal voice tended to be more common in females. In addition, creaky voice was significantly more common at the end of higher prosodic constituents. The analysis of spectral tilt shows that H1–H2 clearly distinguishes breathy voice from modal voice in both males and females, while H1–H2 values consistently discriminate creaky and modal voice in male participants only. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate utterance-final voice quality in bilinguals of English and Spanish, two languages which differ in the type of non-modal voice usually encountered at ends of utterances: American English often has phrase-final creak, whereas in Mexican Spanish, phrase-final voiced sounds are breathy or even devoiced. Twenty-one bilinguals from the San Diego-Tijuana border region were recorded (with electroglottography and audio) reading passages in English and Spanish. Ends of utterances were coded for their visual voice quality as "modal" (having no aspiration noise or voicing irregularity), "breathy" (having aspiration noise), "creaky" (having voicing irregularity), or "breathy-creaky" (having both aspiration noise and voicing irregularity). In utterance-final position, speakers showed more frequent use of both modal and creaky voice when speaking in English, and more frequent use of breathy and breathy-creaky voice when speaking in Spanish. We find no role of language dominance on the rates of these four voice qualities. The electroglottographic and acoustic analyses show that all voice qualities, even utterance-final creak, are produced with increased glottal spreading; the combination of distinct noise measures and amplitude of voicing can distinguish breathy, creaky, and breathy-creaky voice qualities from one another, and from modal voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing body of evidence suggests that phonological processes exhibit both categorical and gradient effects. This study investigates categorical and gradient effects observed in /w/-deletion in Seoul Korean and how the patterns differ by context. Using ultrasound and a side-view camera, midsagittal images of the tongue and lip protrusion of four participants were recorded. The speakers participated in the task of explaining the semantic differences between 18 words of CV and CwV sequence (e.g. tweji ‘pig’ vs. teji ‘earth’). Optical Flow Analysis was used to quantify the magnitude of lip and tongue movement. Results show that different patterns of categorical and gradient effects of /w/-deletion are observed by context. When /w/ is preceded by a bilabial, /w/ tends to delete categorically, while both categorical deletion and gradient reduction appear to occur when /w/ is preceded by an alveolar or a velar. I argue that the categorical and gradient effects of a related phonological process can be present simultaneously, which can be accounted for by diachronic development of sound patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current project undertakes a kinematic examination of vertical larynx actions and intergestural timing stability within multi-gesture complex segments such as ejectives and implosives that may possess specific temporal goals critical to their articulatory realization. Using real-time MRI (rtMRI) speech production data from Hausa non-pulmonic and pulmonic consonants, this study illuminates speech timing between oral constriction and vertical larynx actions within segments and the role this intergestural timing plays in realizing phonological contrasts and processes in varying prosodic contexts. Results suggest that vertical larynx actions have greater magnitude in the production of ejectives compared to their pulmonic counterparts, but implosives and pulmonic consonants are differentiated not by vertical larynx magnitude but by the intergestural timing patterns between their oral and vertical larynx gestures. Moreover, intergestural timing stability/variability between oral and non-oral (vertical larynx) actions differ among ejectives, implosives, and pulmonic consonants, with ejectives having the most stable temporal lags, followed by implosives and pulmonic consonants, respectively. Lastly, the findings show how contrastive linguistic 'molecules' - here, segment-sized phonological complexes with multiple gestures - interact with phrasal context in speech in such a way that it variably shapes temporal organization between participating gestures as well as respecting stability in relative timing between such gestures comprising a segment., (© 2024 the author(s), published by De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston.)