Seminar of James Kirby, invited PhD student from Departement of Linguistics, Univertsity of Chicago - Date: 24th October 2008, 14h00

Speaker:
M. James Kirby
PhD student from the Department of Linguistics of University of Chicago, invited researcher of MICA Center

Date: Friday 24th October 2008, 14h00
Location: MICA Center, polyvalent room, C10 building, 4th floor
Translater: presentation will be done in English

Abstract:
Variations in voice quality (phonation) can be used to convey both linguistic and paralinguistic information. Much previous work has established a relationship between spectral features and voice quality (Gordon & Ladefoged, 2001; Ní Chaisadie & Gobl, 1997; Ohala, 1973). However, accurate calculation of spectral features requires reliable extraction of F0 (Epstein, 2002; Yoon et al., 2005). The difficulties associated with F0 extraction have led many researchers to focus on alternative methods of detecting voice quality, such as EGG or glottal flow derivative (Epstein, 2002; Michaud, 2004).
I present the results of a pilot study using Hanoi Vietnamese, a language in which non-modal phonation is used as a cue to tone identification (Brunelle, 2008; Vũ, 1981). The results indicate that syllabic nuclei bearing tones which are canonically described as containing a non-modal component can be reliably identified on the basis of spectral features, particularly pitch slope and the relative amplitude of lower order harmonics. This result has implications both for psycholinguistic models of perception as well as for the viability of voice quality analysis for large speech corpora using spectral measurements.