Tuesday February 20th 12:00 Greenberg Room
UC Berkeley
Nonmodal phonation in normal and pathological speech: Same river, different water
Nonmodal (e.g. laryngealized, breathy) phonation occurs in pathological speech as well as a contrastive feature in natural languages. Is the phonetic nature of these two types of speech the same or different? How do speakers achieve the production of such a feature? How do listeners of a language with contrastive nonmodal phonation perceive pathological speech? To answer these questions, in this talk I present an integrated approach to the laryngeal phonology phenomenon in three American Indian languages and pathological speech that includes acoustic, electrophysiological analyses, and perceptual-experimental evidence.
The findings indicate that (1) contrastive and pathological nonmodal phonation are different phenomena; (2) the patterns of nonmodal phonation in languages in which it is contrastive are a function of the phonemic status of laryngeal features, tone and phonation; (3) the production of nonmodal phonation in normal natural languages is characterized by a wide range of variability; (4) in perception, phonetic variability is suppressed at a level of representation in which nonmodal phonation corresponds to a single category. These results are discussed in relation to typological generalizations, and theoretical considerations.