Digital video filming of the thyroid prominence was used to measure larynx height in German vowels, with focus on contrasts involving front unrounded, front rounded and back rounded vowels. The study aimed to provide a foundation for interpreting the acoustic consequences of articulatory maneuvres not only at the larynx but also elsewhere in the vocal tract. Results showed the expected pattern of lower larynx position for the rounded vowels. However no clear preference emerged for the same, more, or less larynx lowering on front rounded versus back rounded vowels. Coarticulatory effects of the flanking consonants were weak. The most striking result was that the magnitude of the differences between vowels varied substantially over speakers. This reinforces the contention that interpretation of vertical laryngeal gestures must be embedded in speaker-specific analysis of downstream articulatory maneuvres. Work in this direction is currently in progress.
Cite as: Hoole, P., Kroos, C. (1998) Control of larynx height in vowel production. Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998), paper 1097, doi: 10.21437/ICSLP.1998-360
@inproceedings{hoole98_icslp,
author={Philip Hoole and Christian Kroos},
title={{Control of larynx height in vowel production}},
year=1998,
booktitle={Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998)},
pages={paper 1097},
doi={10.21437/ICSLP.1998-360}
}