Publications

Quantifying labial, palatal, and pharyngeal contributions to third formant lowering in American English/ɹ

Abstract

Although the acoustic profile of /ɹ/ is largely stable across speakers and contexts in rhotic dialects of American English (e.g., Hagiwara, 1995), significant variability is observed in the articulatory implementation of the palatal, pharyngeal, and labial constriction gestures involved in its production (Delattre & Freeman, 1968; Alwan et al., 1999; Tiede et al., 2004). In order to quantify each gesture’s relative contribution to F3 lowering, we expand upon previous work on articulatory-acoustic relations in American English /ɹ/ by examining the acoustic effect of articulatory variation separately for each supralaryngeal constriction gesture. Real-time MRI data from four speakers in the USC-TIMIT corpus (Narayanan et al., 2014) were analyzed to determine the location, length, and aperture for each constriction gesture in 668 tokens of /ɹ/. Acoustic data were taken from simultaneous audio recordings of each speaker’s real-time …

Date
2017
Authors
Sarah Harper, Louis Goldstein, Shrikanth S Narayanan
Journal
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Volume
142
Issue
4_Supplement
Pages
2582-2582
Publisher
Acoustical Society of America