Techniques for the analysis of phonation types in natural languages
Peter Ladefoged, Ian Maddieson · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1983
A variety of techniques have been applied to the analysis of contrastive phonation types by the UCLA Phonetics group. The languages examined have included Burmese, Mon, !Xoo, Korean, Hindi, Bengali, and Marathi. To ensure that we are describing stable properties of the language, rather than individual idiosyncracies, several speakers of each language have been studied. In some cases (e.g., Burmese) the speakers have come to our laboratory, so a full range of experimental techniques can be used. In other cases we have collected data in a desert (e.g., !Xoo) or a monastery (e.g., Mon), so that we were limited to what was portable or socially acceptable. Laboratory techniques include recovery of the glottal volume/velocity waveform through inverse filtering, electro-glottography, and video-taped fiberoptic studies of vocal cord movements. Field techniques include using an airflow mask and pressure transducers, as well as making audio recordings for later spectrographic or other acoustic analysis. The costs and benefits of all these procedures in their application to natural language data will be discussed. [Research funded by NIH.]