Department of Linguistics

Despite the growing number of studies on the acoustics of non-modal phonation, little is known about how two distinct non-modal phonations can interact acoustically when coarticulated. This study investigates the acoustics of potential breathy-to-creaky phonation contours from a production study of native speakers of English, White Hmong, and Korean. These languages differ in the nature of the non-modal phonations. In the English corpus, both the breathiness and creakiness are allophonic. In the Hmong corpus, the breathiness is allophonic but the creakiness is phonemic. In the Korean corpus, the breathiness is arguably phonemic, and the creakiness is allophonic. The contours were analyzed using the three measures of phonation that were found to best differentiate non-modal from modal phonation in these languages: H1*-H2*, H1*-A1*, and Harmonics-to-Noise Ratio. Results from these measures provide support for the presence of breathy-creaky contours in vowels. The duration and differentiation from modal values of the non-modal phonations are largely dependent on whether it is contrastive or allophonic, in support of Blankenship (2002). The limiting of extensive allophonic phonation coarticulation is taken as evidence of a modal feature specification on vowels of English, which lacks contrastive phonation on vowels.