Measures of phonation contrasts in Hmong
Marie K. Huffman · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1985
Previous studies of contrastive phonation types have found that measures of the prominence of the first harmonic relative to the first formant or lower harmonics are fairly reliable correlates of phonation contrasts involving normal, breathy, and creaky voice qualitites. Because variations in phonation type are attributed to the glottal source, it is of interest to determine the extent to which such spectral differences hold of the glottal flow waveform, one indicator of laryngeal behavior. Inverse filtered flow data were analyzed for normal voiced, breathy voiced, and so-called creaky voiced vowels of Hmong, a tone language of Southeast Asia. Spectral analysis indicated that the difference in relative amplitude of the fundamental frequency and the first harmonic (F0-H2) of the glottal spectrum is a very successful indicator of the normal versus breathy voice quality contrast. The supposedly creaky vowels did not differ by any spectral measure. [Work supportd by NINCDS.]