Subglottal resonances of adult male and female native speakers of American English

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Vol. 132; no. 4; pp. 2592 - 2602
• Main Authors: LULICH, Steven M, MORTON, John R, ARSIKERE, Harish, SOMMERS, Mitchell S, LEUNG, Gary K. F, ALWAN, Abeer
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Melville, NY Acoustical Society of America 01-10-2012; American Institute of Physics
• Subjects: Accelerometry; Adolescent; Age Factors; Biological and medical sciences; Biomechanical Phenomena; Body Height; Ear and associated structures. Auditory pathways and centers. Hearing. Vocal organ. Phonation. Sound production. Echolocation; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Glottis - physiology; Humans; Language; Male; Phonation; Sex Factors; Sound Spectrography; Speech Acoustics; Speech Production; Speech Production Measurement; Vertebrates: nervous system and sense organs; Vibration; Voice Quality; Young Adult; Human; Adult; Male; Phonation; Subglottis; Foreign language
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.4748582

This paper presents a large-scale study of subglottal resonances (SGRs) (the resonant frequencies of the tracheo-bronchial tree) and their relations to various acoustical and physiological characteristics of speakers. The paper presents data from a corpus of simultaneous microphone and accelerometer recordings of consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words embedded in a carrier phrase spoken by 25 male and 25 female native speakers of American English ranging in age from 18 to 24 yr. The corpus contains 17,500 utterances of 14 American English monophthongs, diphthongs, and the rhotic approximant [[inverted r]] in various CVC contexts. Only monophthongs are analyzed in this paper. Speaker height and age were also recorded. Findings include (1) normative data on the frequency distribution of SGRs for young adults, (2) the dependence of SGRs on height, (3) the lack of a correlation between SGRs and formants or the fundamental frequency, (4) a poor correlation of the first SGR with the second and third SGRs but a strong correlation between the second and third SGRs, and (5) a significant effect of vowel category on SGR frequencies, although this effect is smaller than the measurement standard deviations and therefore negligible for practical purposes.