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Throaty speech sounds like glottal stops, creaky voice, and epiglottal stops are phonemic speech sounds found in various languages cross-linguistically, yet voice and speech literature has historically associated such sounds with poor vocal technique, vocal misuse, and/or vocal abuse. Currently, there is no clear evidence to support the notion that speech sounds which serve as realizations of phonemes in one language are unhealthy when used prosodically in another. Speech sounds targeted (both historically and contemporarily) for reduction and removal from speech patterns for supposed health concerns in English-speaking voice training tend to be the same speech sounds which are targeted as socially undesirable compared with standardized accents of English. Critical examination of cross-linguistic evidence, social context, and previous historical assumptions are necessary to challenge the classification of a speech sound as poor technique or vocal misuse/abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a detailed examination of voice quality in word-final vowels in Spanish. The experimental task involved the pronunciation of words in two prosodic contexts by native Spanish speakers from diverse dialects. A total of 400 vowels (10 participants × 10 words × 2 contexts × 2 repetitions) were analyzed acoustically in Praat. Waveforms and spectrograms were inspected visually for voice, creak, breathy voice, and devoicing cues. In addition, the relative amplitude difference between the first two harmonics (H1–H2) was obtained via FFT spectra. The findings reveal that while creaky voice is pervasive, breathy voice is also common, and devoicing occurs in 11% of tokens. We identify multiple phonation types (up to three) within the same vowel, of which modal voice followed by breathy voice was the most common combination. While creaky voice was more frequent overall for males, modal voice tended to be more common in females. In addition, creaky voice was significantly more common at the end of higher prosodic constituents. The analysis of spectral tilt shows that H1–H2 clearly distinguishes breathy voice from modal voice in both males and females, while H1–H2 values consistently discriminate creaky and modal voice in male participants only. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate utterance-final voice quality in bilinguals of English and Spanish, two languages which differ in the type of non-modal voice usually encountered at ends of utterances: American English often has phrase-final creak, whereas in Mexican Spanish, phrase-final voiced sounds are breathy or even devoiced. Twenty-one bilinguals from the San Diego-Tijuana border region were recorded (with electroglottography and audio) reading passages in English and Spanish. Ends of utterances were coded for their visual voice quality as "modal" (having no aspiration noise or voicing irregularity), "breathy" (having aspiration noise), "creaky" (having voicing irregularity), or "breathy-creaky" (having both aspiration noise and voicing irregularity). In utterance-final position, speakers showed more frequent use of both modal and creaky voice when speaking in English, and more frequent use of breathy and breathy-creaky voice when speaking in Spanish. We find no role of language dominance on the rates of these four voice qualities. The electroglottographic and acoustic analyses show that all voice qualities, even utterance-final creak, are produced with increased glottal spreading; the combination of distinct noise measures and amplitude of voicing can distinguish breathy, creaky, and breathy-creaky voice qualities from one another, and from modal voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of prosody in a little-studied type of non-canonical questions: syntactically and lexically canonical interrogative sentences that have been uttered by the speaker in order to express surprise. The study compares Estonian surprise questions with string-identical information-seeking questions elicited by means of context descriptions. The materials comprise 1,008 utterances by 21 speakers. It is concluded that the prosody of the examined utterances has three roles that are relevant to the expression of surprise by ordinary interrogative sentences. First, the enhanced prosodic realisation of the utterances as manifested in a longer duration, a wider pitch range, and a more frequent occurrence of upstepped pitch accents conveys emotional expressivity. Second, lower pitch along with the creaky voice quality signals that the utterances are not canonical questions, while the main prosodic correlate of information-seeking questions is high pitch. Phonological pitch accents and boundary tones, however, are not used to distinguish between surprise questions and information-seeking questions. Third, the nuclear accent placement signals an information structure that is associated with the expression of incongruity or counterexpectation: the focal accent can evoke an alternative (set) that arises from the speaker's expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a detailed examination of voice quality in word-final vowels in Spanish. The experimental task involved the pronunciation of words in two prosodic contexts by native Spanish speakers from diverse dialects. A total of 400 vowels (10 participants × 10 words × 2 contexts × 2 repetitions) were analyzed acoustically in Praat. Waveforms and spectrograms were inspected visually for voice, creak, breathy voice, and devoicing cues. In addition, the relative amplitude difference between the first two harmonics (H1–H2) was obtained via FFT spectra. The findings reveal that while creaky voice is pervasive, breathy voice is also common, and devoicing occurs in 11% of tokens. We identify multiple phonation types (up to three) within the same vowel, of which modal voice followed by breathy voice was the most common combination. While creaky voice was more frequent overall for males, modal voice tended to be more common in females. In addition, creaky voice was significantly more common at the end of higher prosodic constituents. The analysis of spectral tilt shows that H1–H2 clearly distinguishes breathy voice from modal voice in both males and females, while H1–H2 values consistently discriminate creaky and modal voice in male participants only.

Occasional short switches to creaky voice are common in spoken discourse of numerous languages without either the speakers or the recipients being highly aware of them, which is the reason the creaky voice phenomenon is, under the best of conditions, considered by them as a phenomenon of going down to very low or even the lowest part of their vocal range. In this paper, it is proposed that creaky voice when it comes to spoken conversations in German and Croatian serves as a short-term mechanism for a relatively delayed formation of completional prosodic patterns that, until the manifestation of the creaky voice, to that point also comprise, among other features, accents with rising or flat tonal components. Such completional patterns may accompany utterances that immediately precede the decision to allow the interlocutor to take turn, utterances that do not immediately precede it, or utterances that immediately precede a change in the speech act by the same speaker. The creaky voice, however, sometimes occurs in other sequences, i.e., within prosodic patterns without the accents bearing rising or flat components of the tonal movement, which is, however, considered as a result of an unintentional ''slipping'' into creaky voice due to the speaker's to low value of the subglottal pressure at the given moment.

This study relies on an interactional, conversational–analytic approach to elucidate what meanings Chilean Spanish speakers convey via creaky voice quality in informal conversations. Highly creaky utterances produced by 18 speakers were derived from a larger corpus of sociolinguistic interview speech from Santiago, Chile, and examined via an interactional approach that accounted for how creaky voice figured in the process of meaning-making and meaning negotiations throughout the conversation. Results indicate that approximately 40% of highly creaky utterances were used to organize the speaker's discourse, signaling the end of turns, hedges or uncertainty, and a change in communicative purpose, while the majority of the highly creaky utterances were used to invoke alignment with the listener via ensuring that their messages or stances were understood and potentially endorsed. This study offers evidence from a non-English language for creaky voice as a tool for both discursive organization and interactional alignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the prosody of the Estonian parenthetical palun ‘please’ in imperative requests. The occurrence of prosodic phrase boundary cues such as pauses, pre-boundary lengthening, and creaky voice as well as pitch characteristics and accentuation are analysed. The analysis is based on 753 utterances, where palun appears in three different positions: initial, medial or final. The requests were elicited using context descriptions from 21 female speakers of Estonian. The results show that palun is not phrased as a separate intonation phrase and that its intonation and accentuation vary depending on its position in the host utterance. Utterance-initially, palun always receives an intonational pitch accent while utterance-finally it is unaccented. It is concluded that the integrated prosody of palun may derive from its discourse marker-like function. Its prosody may be representative of certain other categories of parentheticals with similar functional properties such as comment clauses and reporting verbs, but different from functionally more independent parentheticals that express a proposition or speech act of their own. Kokkuvõte. Eva Liina Asu, Heete Sahkai, Pärtel Lippus: Kiilu palun prosoodiline fraseerimine eesti palvetes. Käesolev artikkel uurib kiilu palun prosoodiat eesti keele käsklausena vormistatud palvetes. Vaadeldakse prosoodilise fraasipiiri tunnuste (pausid, lõpupikenemine ja kärisev häälelaad) esinemist ning põhitooni ja aktsentueerimist. Materjaliks on 753 lausungit, kus palun esineb kolmes eri positsioonis: lause alguses, keskel ja lõpus. Materjal salvestati 21 eesti emakeelega naiskõnelejalt katses, kus osalejad pidid palveid esitama nii, nagu nad kontekstikirjelduse põhjal vastavas olukorras seda teeksid. Tulemused näitavad, et sõna palun ei fraseerita eraldi intonatsioonifraasina ja selle intonatsioon ja aktsentueeritus varieeruvad sõltuvalt lausepositsioonist. Lause alguses saab palun alati intonatsioonilise tooniaktsendi, aga lause lõpus on see aktsentueerimata. Kokkuvõtvalt võib palun’i integreeritud prosoodia tuleneda tema diskursusemarkeri-laadsest funktsioonist. Sellisena võib ta sarnaneda prosoodiliselt ka mõningate teiste sarnaselt funktsioneerivate kiiludega, nagu episteemilised või evidentsiaalsed kiilud (nt ma arvan, ütles ta), aga erineda funktsionaalselt iseseisvamatest kiiludest, mis väljendavad eraldiseisvat propositsiooni või kõneakti.

This study investigates the prosody of the Estonian parenthetical palun 'please' in imperative requests. The occurrence of prosodic phrase boundary cues such as pauses, pre-boundary lengthening, and creaky voice as well as pitch characteristics and accentuation are analysed. The analysis is based on 753 utterances, where palun appears in three different positions: initial, medial or final. The requests were elicited using context descriptions from 21 female speakers of Estonian. The results show that palun is not phrased as a separate intonation phrase and that its intonation and accentuation vary depending on its position in the host utterance. Utterance-initially, palun always receives an intonational pitch accent while utterancefinally it is unaccented. It is concluded that the integrated prosody of palun may derive from its discourse marker-like function. Its prosody may be representative of certain other categories of parentheticals with similar functional properties such as comment clauses and reporting verbs, but different from functionally more independent parentheticals that express a proposition or speech act of their own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many languages use phonation types for phonemic or allophonic distinctions. This study examines the acoustic structure of the phonetic space for vowel phonations across languages. Our sample of eleven languages includes languages with contrastive modal, breathy, creaky, lax, tense, harsh, and/or pharyngealized phonations, and languages with allophonic nonmodal phonation on particular tones. In compiling and analyzing this sample we address related issues such as contrast vs. allophony, phonetic similarity across languages, and understanding complex contrasts of several multidimensional phonetic categories via data reduction. Based on extensive acoustic analysis, all of the languages’ phonations were mapped into a single phonetic space, which exhibits dispersion (languages with more categories use more of the space). The space is largely two-dimensional, with dimensions that can be interpreted phonetically (e.g. dimension 2 is like a traditional breathy-to-creaky continuum) and also can be related back to the acoustic measures that structure them, thus indicating which acoustic measures are most important across languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate utterance-final voice quality in bilinguals of English and Spanish, two languages which differ in the type of non-modal voice usually encountered at ends of utterances: American English often has phrase-final creak, whereas in Mexican Spanish, phrase-final voiced sounds are breathy or even devoiced. Twenty-one bilinguals from the San Diego-Tijuana border region were recorded (with electroglottography and audio) reading passages in English and Spanish. Ends of utterances were coded for their visual voice quality as “modal” (having no aspiration noise or voicing irregularity), “breathy” (having aspiration noise), “creaky” (having voicing irregularity), or “breathy-creaky” (having both aspiration noise and voicing irregularity). In utterance-final position, speakers showed more frequent use of both modal and creaky voice when speaking in English, and more frequent use of breathy and breathy-creaky voice when speaking in Spanish. We find no role of language dominance on the rates of these four voice qualities. The electroglottographic and acoustic analyses show that all voice qualities, even utterance-final creak, are produced with increased glottal spreading; the combination of distinct noise measures and amplitude of voicing can distinguish breathy, creaky, and breathy-creaky voice qualities from one another, and from modal voice.

Objectives: Increased prevalence of social creak particularly among female speakers has been reported in several studies. The study of social creak has been previously conducted by combining perceptual evaluation of speech with conventional acoustical parameters such as the harmonic-to-noise ratio and cepstral peak prominence. In the current study, machine learning (ML) was used to automatically distinguish speech of low amount of social creak from speech of high amount of social creak., Methods: The amount of creak in continuous speech samples produced in Finnish by 90 female speakers was first perceptually assessed by two voice specialists. Based on their assessments, the speech samples were divided into two categories (low vs high amount of creak). Using the speech signals and their creak labels, seven different ML models were trained. Three spectral representations were used as feature for each model., Results: The results show that the best performance (accuracy of 71.1%) was obtained by the following two systems: an Adaboost classifier using the mel-spectrogram feature and a decision tree classifier using the mel-frequency cepstral coefficient feature., Conclusions: The study of social creak is becoming increasingly popular in sociolinguistic and vocological research. The conventional human perceptual assessment of the amount of creak is laborious and therefore ML technology could be used to assist researchers studying social creak. The classification systems reported in this study could be considered as baselines in future ML-based studies on social creak., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

This study relies on an interactional, conversational–analytic approach to elucidate what meanings Chilean Spanish speakers convey via creaky voice quality in informal conversations. Highly creaky utterances produced by 18 speakers were derived from a larger corpus of sociolinguistic interview speech from Santiago, Chile, and examined via an interactional approach that accounted for how creaky voice figured in the process of meaning-making and meaning negotiations throughout the conversation. Results indicate that approximately 40% of highly creaky utterances were used to organize the speaker’s discourse, signaling the end of turns, hedges or uncertainty, and a change in communicative purpose, while the majority of the highly creaky utterances were used to invoke alignment with the listener via ensuring that their messages or stances were understood and potentially endorsed. This study offers evidence from a non-English language for creaky voice as a tool for both discursive organization and interactional alignment.

This paper promotes a sophisticated treatment of gender in variationism through a large-scale quantitative analysis of creak, a nonmodal voice quality stereotypically associated with women in US English. An analysis of our gender-diverse corpus, including cisgender, transgender, and nonbinary individuals, finds that gender does not predict variation; all gender groups produce high rates of creak. However, gender does interact with style: all speakers use more creak in interview speech compared with read speech, but some groups style-shift more than others, suggesting that gender remains a relevant factor in capturing how creak is deployed as a resource in social practice. We use this analysis to advocate for a move beyond the gender binary in quantitative descriptions of sociolinguistic variables and call for the greater inclusion of trans+ individuals in sociolinguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates vocalic creak in connection to the demarcation of prosodic boundaries in Spanish. Data from a picture task from 10 native Spanish speakers from diverse dialects was examined word-medially and word-finally. A total of 800 vowels were analyzed acoustically to determine if they involved creak; duration of creak relative to vowel duration was also recorded. The role of prosodic context, vowel quality and gender were examined. Our results show that creak is one of the cues that signals the end of prosodic constituents, particularly at higher prosodic levels: it averages 64% of realizations word-finally, but only 4% medially; and it is more pervasive in higher prosodic domains. Creak is more likely in males than females (80 vs. 53%), and vowel quality has no effect on creak word-finally, although word-medially /a/ is more frequently creaked than other vowels. We discuss the implications of our results in comparison with previous studies on creaky voice in Spanish and English, in particular Garellek, Marc & Patricia Keating. 2015. Phrase-final creak: Articulation, acoustics, and distribution. In Paper presented at the 89th meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Portland, Oregon, 8–11 January, which report a higher rate of creak for Mexican Spanish females compared to males utterance-finally, and Kim, Ji Young. 2017. Voice quality transfer in the production of Spanish heritage speakers and English L2 learners of Spanish. Silvia Perpiñán. In David Heap, Itziri Moreno-Villamar & Adriana Soto-Corominas (eds.), Selected papers from the 44th linguistic symposium on romance languages (LSRL), 191–207. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, which found creaky voice utterance-finally in L2 Spanish and heritage Spanish speakers, but not in L1 Spanish participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: This study explored the extent and discriminatory potential of interspeaker variation in creaky voice in Dutch men., Methods: Intervals of creaky voice for 30 speakers were manually segmented and annotated from a corpus of spontaneous speech data. For each speaker, at least 1500 syllables were analyzed. Total creakiness was calculated based on the proportion of creaky syllables. Creaky intervals were categorized into subtypes based on the degree of periodicity. Furthermore, acoustic measurements were taken from the intervals and tested for speaker-discriminating capacity by means of a linear discriminant analysis (LDA)., Results: Speakers differed in what percentage of syllables they realized with creaky voice, with a range of roughly 0-5% of all syllables. They likewise differed in the proportion with which they used different subtypes of creaky voice, such that some speakers have very distinctive profiles. The LDA resulted in correct classifications of creaky intervals to speakers at a rate above chance level., Conclusions: Interspeaker variation in creaky voice in Dutch male speech was confirmed and allowed for moderate speaker classification on the basis of speech acoustics., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background: People with cluster headache (CH) are frequently burdened by misdiagnosis or diagnostic delay. The peculiar somatic and behavioral changes characterizing patients with CH are not useful to improve diagnostic accuracy. In our clinical experience, we noticed a typical voice quality with low and croaking tone in patients with CH. In this cross‐sectional study, we evaluated, by digital voice analysis, whether it is possible to identify typical voice quality characterizing patients with CH compared with healthy controls (HCs). Furthermore, to investigate whether putative differences in voice characteristics could be underpinned by constitutional aspects or pathological processes of vocal cords, subjects underwent a videolaryngostroboscopy. Smoking habits and alcohol consumption were specifically investigated. Methods: After conducting digital recording of the voices from both patients with CH and HCs in a soundproof insulated cabin in the laboratory of the Audiology Department, a set of voice parameters was analyzed. We included the measures of fundamental frequency, calculations of jitter and shimmer, and noise‐to‐harmonics ratios as well as quantities related to the spectral tilt (i.e., H1–H2, H1–A1, H1–A2, and H1–A3) in 20 patients with CH and in 13 HCs. A videolaryngostroboscopy was performed in all subjects. Results: Patients with CH, explored during the cluster bout period, showed significantly lower second harmonic (H1–H2) values compared with HCs (−6.9 ± 7.6 vs. 2.1 ± 6.7, p = 0.002), usually characterizing the so‐called creaky voice. By using a laryngoscopy investigation, a significantly higher prevalence of mild to moderate vocal cord edema and laryngopharyngeal reflux signs were found in patients with CH (100% of patients with CH vs. 15% of HC, p < 0.001). Conclusion: Creaky phonation is a "physiological mode of laryngeal operation" usually underpinned by shortened and thickened vocal folds. Creaky voice phonation can be due to a vocal fold's reduced capability to become slack or flaccid secondary to vocal cord edema underpinned by laryngopharyngeal reflux affecting the phonatory mechanisms in patients with CH. The laryngopharyngeal reflux may represent a dysautonomic sign related to the increased parasympathetic tone during in‐bout period, reinforcing the hypothesis of an extracranial autonomic dysfunction as part of CH clinical picture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In some languages, creaky voice is used over relatively long stretches of speech as a prosodic element, to convey emotion, and/or stylistically. A primary acoustic and perceptual cue to creaky voice quality is a low fundamental frequency. Previous research has shown that listeners can make fine-grained comparisons of speakers' habitual modal pitch, but this study focuses on how a combination of modal and nonmodal phonation affects the perception of habitual pitch. A perception experiment assesses whether listeners are more likely to rate a speaker's utterance as being holistically lower in pitch if it contains both modal and creaky voice than if it is fully modal speech. Results indicate that for female American English speakers with higher modal pitch, the inclusion of creaky voice leads listeners to rate such utterances as lower in pitch than fully modal utterances, but not for speakers with lower modal pitch. These results are consistent with studies showing that pitch perception interacts with nonmodal phonation, and they relate to previous observations that speakers may utilize nonmodal phonation to manipulate their intended habitual pitch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Low pitch is a primary cue to creaky voice identification. • Speaker characteristics important in creak perception alongside acoustic cues. • Listeners' experiences of gender-typical pitch ranges influence creak perception. Creaky voice is a non-modal voice quality generally described as sounding pulse-like and low in pitch. While empirical studies have produced mixed results when it comes to creak prevalence by speaker gender, creaky voice is stereotypically associated with women's speech. Past research has investigated whether listeners are facilitated in their identification of creaky voice through the degree of pitch differences between modal and creaky voice or by social biases associating creak with women's speech. Results, however, have been relatively inconclusive. The present study addresses this question through a perception experiment, using highly controlled stimuli. 258 listeners were asked to identify whether they heard creak or not when presented with stimuli manipulated for f0 and creaky voice from two-word phrases produced by a male and a female speaker of Australian English. Accuracy data and response times were analysed. Findings suggest that speakers of Australian English rely less on social biases when identifying creaky voice and instead make decisions based on pitch, modulated by their experience-based expectations about typical pitch ranges according to speaker gender. Results emphasise the importance of incorporating characteristics of the speaker into models of the perception of creaky voice, and voice quality more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Livonian is unique among the Finnic languages in possessing a two-way tonal contrast in primary stressed syllables. Observed already in the earliest linguistic descriptions of Livonian, this two-way contrast between stressed syllables with stød (also called broken tone) and plain tone closely resembles the tonal system of Latvian with which Livonian has been in close long-term contact. This paper describes a pilot study, which used six measurements of spectral tilt (h1-h2, h1-F1, h1-F2, h1+h2/2-F1, h1-F3, F2-F3) to determine whether Livonian stød was associated with any non-modal phonation, specifically creaky voice. Spectral tilt is the degree to which intensity decreases as frequency increases (Gordon and Ladefoged 2001). Earlier researchers (e.g., Vihman 1971) have noted that stød vowels tend to be laryngealised, therefore, creaky voice is a likely candidate for non-modal phonation associated with stød. The method in this study is based on that used by Esposito (2004) in her similar study of Santa Ana del Valle Zapotec. The study used data from archival recordings of Pētõr Damberg, a speaker of the East Dialect of Courland Livonian from the village of Sīkrõg, and focused on measurement of CVV syllables containing either [ǭ] or [ō] (IPA: [o̞ː] and [oː]). Kokkuvõte. Uldis Balodis: Mittemodaalne fonatsioon liivi keele katketooniga sõnade vokaalides. Liivi keel on läänemeresoome keelte seas mõneti ainulaadses olukorras, kuna sõnade pearõhulistes silpides ilmneb tonaalne vastandus. Juba varasemad liivi keele kirjeldused on näidanud, et selles vastanduvad katketoon ehk stød ja püsitoon. Toonisüsteemi poolest on liivi keel sarnane läti keelega, millega liivi keel on olnud pikaajalises kontaktis. Käesolevas artiklis uuritakse, kas liivi stød on seotud mittemodaalse fonatsiooniga, eriti nn käriseva häälega (creaky voice). Selle kindlaks tegemiseks mõõdeti spektrikallet (spectral tilt) kuuest punktist (h1-h2, h1-F1, h1-F2, h1+h2/2-F1, h1-F3, F2-F3). Spektrikalle on aste või punkt, kuhu intensiivsus võib sageduse suurenedes tõusta (Gordon and Ladefoged 2001). Käesolevas uurimuses kasutatud meetod põhineb samal meetodil, mida kasutas Esposito (2004) oma uurimuses Santa Ana del Valle Zapotec kohta. Ainestik on pärit idaliivi keelejuhilt Pētõr Dambergilt (Kuramaalt Sīkrõgi külast). Analüüsitud materjal sisaldas CVV esisilbiga sõnu, kus esinesid pikad vokaalid [ǭ] või [ō] (IPA: [o̞ː] ja [oː]). Varasemad uurimused (nt Vihman 1971) on näidanud, et stødiga vokaalid kalduvad olema larüngaliseeritud, mistõttu võib stødi puhul kärisevat häält seostada mittemodaalse fonatsiooniga, seda osutavad ka selle artikli tulemused. Märksõnad: toon, stød, katketoon, fonatsioon, spektrikalle, kärisev hääl, liivi keel Kubbõvõttõks. Uldis Balodis: Līvõ kīel īžkillijizt äbmodāli fonātsij katkāndõksõks sõņši. Līvõ kēļ um īžki vāldamiersūomõ kīeld siegās, sīest ku sīe ežmis zilbsõ võib vȱlda kakš tūoņõ (katkāndõks agā murdtõd tūoņ ja tazzi/ nūziji tūoņ). Siedā kūlizt jõvā ežmizt līvõ kīel tuņšlijizt. Līvõ kīel ja lețkīel tūoņõd sistēmõd ātõ väggi ītizt, sīest ku nänt rõkāndijizt ātõ kōgiņ jellõnd īdtuoiz kūoral. Sīes tuņšlimizõs um kȭlbatõd kūd spektõr vändit (engliš kīels spectral tilt) aigõ (h1-h2, h1-F1, h1-F2, h1+h2/2-F1, h1-F3, F2-F3). Sīen um sēļțamõst, või līvõ kīel katkāndõks um mingi eņtšvīți fonātsij tīp. Spektõr vändit um āiga, mis nägțõb, kui pǟgiņ kildzit sadāb, až sagdit nūzõb (Gordon ja Ladefoged 2001). Jedmilizt tuņšlimizt (ngț. Vihman 1971) ātõ nägțõnd, ku katkāndõksõks īžkillijizt jūs um lieudtõb laringalizātsij, ja keržiji ēļ sugūb äbmodālizõst fonātsijst. Sīe tuņšlimiz pierāst kȭlbatõd metod um seļļi īž nemē Esposito (2004) kȭlbatiz Santa Ana del Valle zapotek kīel tunšlimiz pierāst. Tuņšlimiz materjalõks ātõ Kurāmō idālīvõ murd rõkāndijiz Pētõr Damberg tekstõd (Damberg vȯļ Sīkrõg kilāst). Analīz pierāst sait võttõd sõnād CVV ežmiz zilbõks, missõs āt pitkād īžkillijizt [ǭ] agā [ō] (IPA: [o̞ː] ja [oː]).

Phonetic convergence is the process by which a speaker adapts his/her speech to sound more similar to his/her interlocutor. While most studies analysing this process have been conducted amongst speakers sharing the same language or variety, this experiment focuses on imitation between non-native and native speakers in a repetition task. The data is a fragment from the ANGLISH corpus designed by Anne Tortel (Tortel, 2008). 40 French speakers (10 male intermediate, 10 male advanced, 10 female intermediate and 10 female advanced learners) were asked to repeat a set of 20 sentences produced by British native speakers. Segmental (vowel quality), suprasegmental (vowel duration) and voice quality were analysed. Level of proficiency, gender and model talker were taken as independent variables. Level appeared not to be a relevant parameter due to a high amount of inter-individual variability amongst groups. Somewhat contradictory results were observed for vowel duration and F1-F2 distance for male learners converged more than female learners. Our hypothesis that low vowels display a higher degree of imitation, and especially within the F1 dimension (Babel, 2012), was partially validated. Convergence in vowel duration in order to sound more native-like was also observed (Zając, 2013). Regarding the analysis of voice quality, and more particularly of creaky voice, observations suggest that some advanced female learners creaked more than the native speakers and more in the reading task, which indicate, both linguistic idiosyncrasy and accommodation towards the native speakers. Low vowels seem also to be more likely to be produced with a creaky voice, especially at the end of prosodic constituents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Livonian is unique among the Finnic languages in possessing a two-way tonal contrast in primary stressed syllables. Observed already in the earliest linguistic descriptions of Livonian, this two-way contrast between stressed syllables with stød (also called broken tone) and plain tone closely resembles the tonal system of Latvian with which Livonian has been in close long-term contact. This paper describes a pilot study, which used six measurements of spectral tilt (h1-h2, h1-F1, h1-F2, h1+h2/2-F1, h1-F3, F2-F3) to determine whether Livonian stød was associated with any non-modal phonation, specifically creaky voice. Spectral tilt is the degree to which intensity decreases as frequency increases (Gordon and Ladefoged 2001). Earlier researchers (e.g., Vihman 1971) have noted that stød vowels tend to be laryngealised, therefore, creaky voice is a likely candidate for non-modal phonation associated with stød. The method in this study is based on that used by Esposito (2004) in her similar study of Santa Ana del Valle Zapotec. The study used data from archival recordings of Pētõr Damberg, a speaker of the East Dialect of Courland Livonian from the village of Sīkrõg, and focused on measurement of CVV syllables containing either [ǭ] or [ō] (IPA: [o̞ː] and [oː]). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]