15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


The Effects of F0 and Position-in-Utterance on Phonation in Santa Ana Del Valle Zapotec

Christina M. Esposito

University of California at Los Angeles, USA

This study examines the effects of F0 and position on phonation in Santa Ana del Valle Zapotec, a language that contrasts modal, breathy and creaky voice on vowels. The first part of this experiment determined that F0, and not position-in-utterance, influenced phonation. In the second experiment, the effects of F0 on phonation were examined in more detail. Speakers were asked to produce words from each phonation in four prosodic positions: in isolation (high F0), focused sentence-initially (high F0), sentence-medially (mid F0) and sentence-finally (lower F0).
   In medial position, a contrast between breathy, modal and creaky voice was found. In sentence-final position, when the tokens had a lower F0, the contrast between modal, breathy and creaky voice was preserved, but with modal and breathy words both breathier. In both isolation and sentence-initial position, when tokens had higher F0, the contrast between phonations was minimized.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Esposito, Christina M. (2003): "The effects of F0 and position-in-utterance on phonation in Santa Ana del Valle Zapotec", In ICPhS-15, 2181-2184.