ASA 129th Meeting - Washington, DC - 1995 May 30 .. Jun 06
5pSC15. Individual differences in the glottalization of vowel-initial
syllables.
Laura Dilley
Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel
Speech Commun. Group, Res. Lab. of Electron., MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139
Speakers of American English often glottalize the onset of a vowel-initial
syllable, and recent work has shown that this is particularly likely to occur
when the syllable is located at prosodically significant locations, such as the
beginning of an intonational phrase, or at a pitch accent [Pierrehumbert and
Talkin Labphon II, 1992; Dilley et al., 2978 (A) (1994)]. Analysis of
speech read by 4 different professional radio news announcers and 4
nonprofessional speakers shows (a) the importance of prosodic structure in
determining the occurrence of glottalization holds across speakers, (b)
speakers are differentially likely to glottalize overall, and (c) speakers are
differentially likely to glottalize in different prosodic contexts. For
example, the 4 FM radio newscasters showed overall glottalization rates of 41%,
38%, 22%, and 7%, and some speakers were more likely to glottalize reduced
vowels than others were. The implications of these patterns of variation for
speech recognition and synthesis, as well as for models of speech production
planning, will be discussed. [Supported in part by a grant from NIDCD.]