A study of the language dominance effects on bilinguals’ voice quality
Marielle Bruyninckx, Bernard Georges Harmegnies · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1999
This paper examines whether language dominance exerts influences on speaker’s voice quality. Ten French–Polish bilingual subjects, split into a French-dominant group and a Polish-dominant group, were selected. They were asked to record five utterances of two balanced texts (one for each language). One FFT-based LTAS was computed for each utterance. The so-obtained 100 spectra were compared by means of a pattern recognition procedure: the SDDD dissimilarity index. Two types of within-speaker comparisons were performed for each subject: within-language comparisons and between-language comparisons. The results show that the average SDDD index values derived from the between-language comparisons score higher than those drawn from within-language matchings. This confirms our earlier results based on different types of bilinguals. The within-language FR/FR SDDD index values tend to score higher in the French-dominant group than the POL/POL ones; the opposite relationship can be observed in Polish-dominant subjects. These results empower one to generalize the idea that language dominance seems to be a significant variable in the characterization of the phonetic behavior of speakers using more than one language.