Individual variations in the nasal tissue vibration during speech
Yoshiyuki Horii, Joan A. Lang · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1980
Individual differences in the magnitude of nasal tissue vibration during sustained production of /i, a, u, m, n/ and oral reading of the “Zoo” passage (Fletcher, 1971) and “Rainbow” passage (Fairbanks, 1960) were examined using a miniature accelerometer and computerized analysis procedures. Results from eight male and eight female adults showed overall differences as large as 15 dB among the subjects. Average differences between the two passages biased with the frequency of nasal consonant occurrences ranged approximately from 6 to 10 dB. Furthermore, the relation between the nasal accelerometric level and vocal intensity level was found nonlinear and more complicated than the two-to-one power ratio reported by Garber and Moller (1979). Implications of these findings and some normalization methods (Stevens et al., 1976; Horii, 1980) are discussed. [Work supported by NIH.]