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- Title
An Acoustic Study of Vowels Produced by Alaryngeal Speakers in Taiwan.
- Authors
Jia-Shiou Liao
- Abstract
Purpose: This study investigated the acoustic properties of 6 Taiwan Southern Min vowels produced by 10 laryngeal speakers (LA), 10 speakers with a pneumatic artificial larynx (PA), and 8 esophageal speakers (ES). Method: Each of the 6 monophthongs of Taiwan Southern Min (/i, e, a, ɔ, u, ə/) was represented by a Taiwan Southern Min character and appeared randomly on a list 3 times (6 Taiwan Southern Min characters × 3 repetitions = 18 tokens). Each Taiwan Southern Min character in this study has the same syllable structure, /V/, and all were read with tone 1 (high and level). Acoustic measurements of the 1st formant, 2nd formant, and 3rd formant were taken for each vowel. Then, vowel space areas (VSAs) enclosed by /i, a, u/ were calculated for each group of speakers. The Euclidean distance between vowels in the pairs /i, a /, /i, u/, and /a, u / was also calculated and compared across the groups. Results: PA and ES have higher 1st or 2nd formant values than LA for each vowel. The distance is significantly shorter between vowels in the corner vowel pairs /i, a/ and /i, u/. PA and ES have a significantly smaller VSA compared with LA. Conclusions: In accordance with previous studies, alaryngeal speakers have higher formant frequency values than LA because they have a shortened vocal tract as a result of their total laryngectomy. Furthermore, the resonance frequencies are inversely related to the length of the vocal tract (on the basis of the assumption of the source filter theory). PA and ES have a smaller VSA and shorter distances between corner vowels compared with LA, which may be related to speech intelligibility. This hypothesis needs further support from future study.
- Subjects
TAIWAN; VOWELS; ALARYNGEAL speech; ACOUSTIC phonetics; SOUTHERN Min dialects; LARYNGEALS (Phonetics); RESONANCE frequency analysis; LARYNGECTOMEES; ACOUSTIC measurements; ANALYSIS of variance; ARTIFICIAL larynges; STATISTICAL correlation; LARYNGECTOMY; LARYNGEAL diseases; PROBABILITY theory; RESEARCH evaluation; RESEARCH funding; PHYSIOLOGICAL aspects of speech; SPEECH therapy; STATISTICS; DATA analysis; INTER-observer reliability; REPEATED measures design; DESCRIPTIVE statistics; ONE-way analysis of variance
- Publication
American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 2016, Vol 25, Issue 4, p481
- ISSN
1058-0360
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1044/2016_AJSLP-15-0068