ASA 127th Meeting M.I.T. 1994 June 6-10

1pSP37. Manifestations of contrastive emphasis in jaw movement.

Donna Erickson

Dept. of Speech and Hear. Sci., Ohio State Univ., Columbus, OH 43210

Kevin Lenzo

Osamu Fujimura

Ohio State Univ., Columbus, OH 43210

Measurements of area, duration, excursion, position, and velocity of mandible motion from x-ray microbeam pellet traces were examined [K. Lenzo and D. Erickson, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. (1994)]. Three American English speakers read sentences of the types, ``Is it 599 Pine Street? No, it's 59FIVE Pine Street,'' with contrastive emphasis on each of the initial, medial, and final numbers, and also without contrastive emphasis [J. Westbury and O. Fujimura, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 85, S98 (1989)]. Composite reference phrases were created and a set of difference measures between the reference phrase and each token on the emphasis conditions was calculated. A ``1'' was assigned to the word with perceived contrastive emphasis and ``0'' to the other words in order to determine which articulatory measure correlated most highly with the presence of contrastive emphasis. Excursion in the final part of the syllable shows the highest correlation with contrastive emphasis for all three speakers, suggesting that the VC portion of the syllable is more sensitive to contrastive emphasis than the CV portion or the CVC as a whole. The implications of these findings to a model of speech production are discussed. [This work has been supported in part by a research fund from ATR International, given to O. Fujimura.]