PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Phonation type has been found to interact with other acoustic characteristics of speech, including vowel formants. Here, we investigated the relation between phonation type and formants in three Swedish vowels, produced in three phonation types (neutral, breathy and pressed). Our findings show that the formant values change from neutral to breathy and pressed, respectively, but that this effect is more consistent for pressed than for breathy phonation. Moreover, while some systematic patterns can be identified, there is also substantial speaker variation in the size and in the direction of the change. We then employed the formant values, along with other acoustic features, to automatically classify phonation type. The addition of formant information to the classifier significantly improved the performance of the system.