Laryngealization and features for Chinese tonal recognition

It is well known that the lowest tone in Mandarin, a language without contrastive phonation, often co-occurs with laryngealization/creaky voice quality, and we provide evidence that this is also the case for the lowest tone in Cantonese. However, the effects of laryngealization on f0 feature extraction for tonal recognition, as well as the potential of laryngealization as a feature for improving tonal recognition, have not been well-discussed in the literature. We give evidence from a corpora of tonal production data for Cantonese and Mandarin that laryngealization is prevalent and significantly disturbs the extraction of f0 features, and suggest that laryngealization may in fact be a feature that could improve tonal recognition.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: INTERSPEECH
• Authors: Kristine M. Yu
• Keywords: INTERSPEECH 2010, Laryngealization, Lowest Tone, Signal Processing, Tonal Recognition