Control of Japanese pitch accent by electrolarynx talkers

作     者：Noriko Kobayashi 

作者机构：ATR Auditory and Visual Perception Research Laboratories Twin 21 MID Tower 2‐1‐61 Shiromi Higashi‐ku Osaka 540 Japan 

出 版 物：《The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America》 

年 卷 期：2005年第84卷第S1期

页      面：S83-S83页

学科分类：07[理学] 082403[工学-水声工程] 08[工学] 070206[理学-声学] 0824[工学-船舶与海洋工程] 0702[理学-物理学] 

摘      要：Japanese word accent is known to be characterized by changes in vocal pitch. For speech with an electrolarynx of transcervical type, production of pitch accent is a difficult speech task, since most electrolarynges are not designed to facilitate quick pitch changes. However, skilled Japanese electrolarynx talkers manage to produce contrasts of word accent to a certain extent. This paper reports some perceptual cues and their effects for word accent produced by Japanese electrolarynx talkers. Subjects are four male laryngectomees who use electrolarynges with good speech intelligibility. Audio recordings were made during multiple repetitions of ten types of word pairs. Each pair consisted of two‐mora words with identical phoneme sequences and contrasting accent types. Acoustic analyses revealed that the talkers successfully produced accent contrasts mainly by changing the segmental duration. Discussion will be made on some speech strategies that are not used by normal talkers for producing major perceptual cues but which are sometimes effective for the speech handicapped population for whom normal cues are not available.