ASA 129th Meeting - Washington, DC - 1995 May 30 .. Jun 06

5pSC30. Laxness of voice quality integrates with F1 (usually, but not always, negatively).

Linguistics Dept., Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003

Neil A. Macmillan

Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY 11210

Both lax voice and advanced tongue root typically concentrate energy at low frequencies: Laxing the voice increases the relative prominence of the first harmonic, and advancing the tongue root lowers F1. A previous study [Thorburn et al., 2871 (A) (1994)] using the Garner paradigm found that these acoustically similar effects integrated perceptually for vowels in CVC context. In this study, the range of voice quality was extended to include tensor values. Across the entire set of voice qualities sampled in the two experiments, laxness integrated negatively with F1 at the lax and tense ends of the continuum but positively at intermediate values. This pattern of mean integrality is distinct from the additional finding of variance integrality, that is, greater uncertainty in judging voice quality when F1 varied than when it did not (and similarly for judgments of F1). According to a model of Durlach et al. [Percept. Psychophys. 46, 293--296 (1989)], the variance-integrality effects can be attributed to a sensory rather than a context-coding source. [Work supported by NSF and NIH.]