The distribution of phonation type index k
Hansang Park · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2002
A phonation type index k was proposed to account for variation in the phonation type. (Park, 2001) In this study we investigated the distribution of the phonation type index k to see a mode of the phonation type. The distribution of the phonation type index k is expected to be multimodal if a phonation type is sustained through the entire vowel. However, it is expected to be unimodal if the phonation type difference is not so significant or if distinct phonation types are not maintained through the entire vowel but occur only at earlier part of the vowel. An experiment was conducted with Standard Korean data that have three linguistically distinct phonation types: aspirated, lenis, and fortis. The results showed that the distribution of the phonation type index k was unique to each speaker. The distribution of the phonation type index k was close to bimodal for one speaker while unimodal for the other two speakers. The distribution of the phonation type index k also showed differences in mean, standard deviation, skewness, and kurtosis across speakers.