Breathy and whispery voicing in White Hmong

The White dialect of Hmong uses breathy voice as a tonal feature, and also a distinctive whispery voice as a stop consonant feature. In this paper, acoustic measurements are shown to validate the apparent differences between these two similar phonation types. In particular, relative harmonic intensi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inProceedings of meetings on acoustics Vol. 4; no. 1
Main Authors Fulop, Sean A., Golston, Chris
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published 01.07.2008
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Summary:The White dialect of Hmong uses breathy voice as a tonal feature, and also a distinctive whispery voice as a stop consonant feature. In this paper, acoustic measurements are shown to validate the apparent differences between these two similar phonation types. In particular, relative harmonic intensity and harmonicity were found to be, in general, three ways distinct among Hmong modal, breathy, and whispery phonation. The discovery of distinctly pronounced breathy and whispery phonation in a single language has implications for the representational theory which is used to specify the phonetic grammar.
ISSN:1939-800X
DOI:10.1121/1.3033931