Donna Erickson

Articulation of Extreme Formant Patterns for Emphasized Vowels

This study examined formant, jaw and tongue dorsum measurements from X-ray microbeam recordings of American English speakers producing emphasized vs. unemphasized words containing high-front, mid-front and low vowels. For emphasized vowels, the jaw position, regardless of vowel height, was lower, while the tongue dorsum had a more extreme articulation in the direction of the phonological specification of the vowel. For emphasized low vowels, the tongue dorsum position was lower with the acoustic consequence of F1 and F2 bunched closer together. For emphasized high and mid-front vowels, the tongue was more forward with the acoustic consequence of F1 and F2 spread more apart. These findings are interpreted within acoustic models of speech production. They also provide empirical data which have application to the C/D model hypothesis that both increased lowering of jaw and enhanced tongue gesture are consequences of a magnitude increase in the syllable pulse due to emphasis.

Effects of Contrastive Emphasis on Jaw Opening

This paper examines the effect of contrastive emphasis on the amount of vertical jaw displacement, as measured from X-ray microbeam data, for 3 American English speakers. Jaw opening in short utterances with one word emphasized (in initial, middle, and final positions) was compared with that of similar utterances with no words emphasized. The results suggest that emphasis involves not only a significant increase in jaw opening on the word emphasized but also possibly a reduction of jaw opening on the word following emphasis. Emphasis in addition may affect the amount of jaw opening of the utterance as a whole, in terms of a decrement in jaw opening on all the remaining words in the utterance following the emphasized word. The relationship between jaw opening and hierarchical levels of prosodic structure is tentatively discussed.

Exploratory study of some acoustic and articulatory characteristics of sad speech.

This study examines acoustic and articulatory EMA data of two female speakers (American and Japanese) spontaneously producing emotional speech while engaged in an informal telephone-type conversation. A set of control data in which the speakers imitated or read the original emotional utterance was also recorded; for the American speaker, the intonation pattern was also imitated. The results suggest (1) acoustic and articulatory characteristics of spontaneous sad speech differ from that of read speech or imitated intonation speech, (2) spontaneous sad speech and imitated sad speech seem to have similar acoustic characteristics (high F0, changed F1 as well as voice quality), but articulation is different in terms of lip, jaw and tongue positions, and (3) speech that is rated highly by listeners as sad is associated with high F0 and changed voice quality.

Metrical Structure and Production of English Rhythm

This paper examines kinematic patterns of jaw opening and associated F1 values of 4 American English speakers in productions of the sentence ‘I saw five bright highlights in the sky’. Results show strong-weak jaw opening alternations during the production of the utterance, and significant correlation of F1 with jaw opening for 3 of the 4 speakers. The observed jaw opening patterns correspond to metrically generated syllable stress levels for productions of the sentence by these 4 speakers.

The production of low tones in English intonation

Abstract This paper examines the relationship between fundamental frequency(F0) target and sternohyoid (SH) activity in low tones of four different pitch accents and of a phrase boundary in English intonation contours produced at three levels of overall vocal effort. Minimum F0 values for the low targets differed as a function of paradigmatically contrasting tone type and as a function of voice effort level. SH activity level also varied as a function of tone type, in inverse relationship to the F0 value. However, it did not show the same simple relationship to variation in F0 value as a function of overall vocal effort, suggesting a shift in the baseline value due perhaps to concomitant changes in subglottal pressure or to jaw lowering for segmental effect.

Interactive component extraction from fEEG, fNIRS and peripheral biosignals for affective brain-machine interfacing paradigms

This paper investigates whether some well understood principles of human behavioral analysis can be used to design novel paradigms for affective brain-computer/machine interfaces. This is achieved by using the visual, audio, and audiovisual stimuli representing human emotions. The analysis of brain responses to such stimuli involves several challenges related to the conditioning of brain electrical responses, extraction of the responses to stimuli and mutual information between the several physiological recording modalities used. This is achieved in the time-frequency domain, using multichannel empirical mode decomposition (EMD), which proves very accurate in the joint analysis of neurophysiological and peripheral body signals. Our results indicate the usefulness of such an approach and confirm the possibility of using affective brain-computer/machine interfaces.

Neutralizing differences in jaw displacement for English vowels

Maximum jaw displacement in the syllable varies primarily by vowel quality, syllable position in the phrase, lexical and phrasal stress, prosodic conditions, and the syllable consonantal periphery. EMA recordings were made of CVC syllables in 3-word phrases uttered by an American English speaker, where three target CVC words occurred in phrase initial, middle, and final positions, in order to ascertain the effect of vowel quality and syllable phrase position on jaw displacement, independent of other factors. Eleven English vowels, omitting diphthongs, formed the syllable nuclei, voiceless obstruents /p, t, k/ formed the syllable periphery, and the intonation pattern was kept constant for each phrase. Jaw displacement was measured by coil placement at the midline of the base of the lower incisors. The maximum vertical mandibular displacement on the vertical axis (z-axis for 3D EMA) was measured for each target CVC word. For each of the 11 vowels, an algorithm was developed to neutralize differences in the ...

Jaw displacement and F0 in contrastive emphasis.

This study examines the relationship between highest F0 (within the sonorant portion of the syllable) and maximum jaw displacement (lowest vertical position of the mandible in reference to the maxillary occlusal plane) in utterances with contrastive emphasis. Acoustic and articulatory recordings were made using the x‐ray microbeam facilities at the University of Wisconsin [J. Westbury and O. Fujimura, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 85, S98 (1989)]. Three American English subjects produced question–answer sentences like ‘‘Is it 599 Pine Street? No, it’s 59FIVE Pine Street,’’ reading from a monitor display with a marking on the digit to be emphasized either in initial, middle, final position, or with no emphasis. The data showed positive correlation between jaw opening and F0 for syllables spoken with contrastive emphasis, but no correlation for nonemphasized syllables. One would expect two opposite biomechanical effects of jaw opening on F0: a positive effect by the action of jaw opening muscle on larynx ele...

The function of strap muscles in speech: pitch lowering or jaw opening

This paper reports on one aspect of a continuing study to determine the physiological correlates of the changes in fundamental voice frequency (F0). Several electromyographic (EMG) studies with speech have reported an association of strap‐muscle activity, particularly the sternohyoid, with low F0 and some of these studies suggest that the sternohyoid is actively involved in lowering F0. It has also been suggested, however, that the sternohoid is involved with jaw opening, and that the reported pitch‐lowering effects may actually be the result of jaw opening. To investigate this question an EMG experiment was conducted on one speaker of American English under normal and clenched jaw conditions. The normal utterances were of the form “Bev loves Bob” with emphasis on the various words. The clenched‐jaw data were obtained while the subject held his jaw fixed by biting on a tongue depressor and intoned the corresponding intonation patterns with a fixed vowel carrier /a/. The results indicate that the strap mus...

Articulatory and acoustic characteristics of emphasized and unemphasized vowels

This study examines the relation between formants, jaw x−y position and tongue dorsum x−y position for emphasized and unemphasized vowels (/ay/ as in ‘‘high,’’ /iy/ as in ‘‘he,’’ and /eh/ as in ‘‘head’’). Acoustic and articulatory measurements were made for target syllables at the moment of jaw height minimum, comparing emphasized and unemphasized conditions of the same vowel. The results can be interpreted as a hyperarticulation of both jaw and tongue movement for emphasis. When emphasized, mandibular position shows increased lowering with forward movement along the front–back axis of the occlusal plane, for all three vowels. The tongue dorsum shows increased raising and fronting for /iy/ and /eh/ but increased lowering and backing for /ay/. The associated F1‐F2 show a corresponding spreading apart of F1‐F2 for the higher vowels, and a bunching of F1‐F2 for the low vowel consistent with the biomechanics of tongue/jaw articulation. These results are interpreted in light of the C/D model which assumes that...