Voice quality as a cue to location in a speaker’s fundamental frequency f0 range: A perceptual study of English and Mandarin.
Jason B. Bishop · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2010
Recent research shows that listeners can locate a specific f0 within a speaker’s individual range without prior experience with the speaker’s voice [Honorof and Whalen, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 117, 2193–2200 (2005)], suggesting that perhaps some acoustic parameters co-vary with f0 range and are available to listeners. Here we tested Honorof and Whalen’s hypothesis that this information lies in voice quality. English- and Mandarin-speaking listeners heard brief, steady-state /ɑ/ tokens from various locations throughout the f0 ranges of ten English and ten Mandarin voices and were asked to identify where in the speaker’s pitch range a given token came from. To test for listeners’ use of voice quality in the task, we compared mixed effect linear models of responses that included three acoustic measures of the stimuli associated with voice quality: H1-H2, H2-H4, and cepstral peak prominence. Preliminary findings show (1) each of the voice quality measures contributed significantly to the models, although they accounted for only a small portion of the variance in responses compared to f0 and (2) models improved significantly when the language of the voice, but not of the listener, was included; this variable represents further language-specific properties of the voices still to be explored.