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

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003

Voice Quality: The 4th Prosodic Dimension

Nick Campbell (1), Parham Mokhtari (2)

(1) ATR-HIS, Japan
(2) JST/CREST, Japan

This paper presents data from an analysis of a large conversational-speech corpus, showing evidence that voice quality, as measured on a continuum from pressed to breathy using a normalized amplitude quotient (NAQ), is varied consistently, and in much the same way as, but independently of, fundamental frequency, to signal paralinguistic information. We show that interlocutor, speaking-style, and speech-act all have significant interactions with NAQ, and argue that voice-quality should be considered as the 4th prosodic parameter, along with pitch, power, and duration.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Campbell, Nick / Mokhtari, Parham (2003): "Voice quality: the 4th prosodic dimension", In ICPhS-15, 2417-2420.