Articulatory Consequences of Vocal Effort Elicitation Method

Articulatory features from two datasets, Slovak and Swedish, were compared to see whether different methods of eliciting loud speech (ambient noise vs. visually presented loudness target) result in different articulatory behavior. The features studied were temporal and kinematic characteristics of lip separation within the closing and opening gestures of bilabial consonants, and of the tongue body movement from /i/ to /a/ through a bilabial consonant. The results indicate larger hyper - articulation in the speech elicited with visually presented target. While individual articulatory strategies are evident, t he speaker groups agree on increasing the kinematic features consistently within each gesture in response to the increased vocal effort. Another concerted strategy is keeping the tongue response considerably smaller than that of the lips, presumably to preserve acoustic prerequisites necessary for the adequate vowel identity. While the method of visually presented loudness target elicits larger span of vocal effort, the two elicitation methods achieve comparable consistency per loudness conditions.Stockholm University-University of Helsinki collaboration gran