Voice Quality: the Laryngeal Articulator, Infant Speech Acquisition, Speech Origins

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John H. Esling, Professor Emeritus, FRSC
University of Victoria, Canada
Past-President, International Phonetic Association

The Laryngeal Articulator Model is a novel phonetic view of the vocal tract and the foundation for a revised theory of voice quality. The vocal folds, ventricular folds, aryepiglottic folds, epilaryngeal tube, and larynx height have been shown to be responsible for the generation of multiple types of periodic vibration and complex modification of the pharyngeal resonating chamber, accounting for a wide range of contrastive auditory qualities in the languages of the world. Instrumental phonetic images, drawn from laryngoscopy, ultrasound and cineradiography, are presented to illustrate states of the larynx, phonation types, and linguistic exemplars from an extensive range of language families. Multimedia 3-D modelling of the larynx within the vocal tract is also illustrated. Voice quality categories are illustrated with videos of well-known speakers and musical performers.

The model has implications for theories of speech acquisition and sound change. The ‘Laryngeal Articulator’ is the principal mechanism that infants first learn to control as they test and practice their phonetic production skills from birth through the first several months of life. The auditory/acoustic cues generated in the pharynx in the wide range of languages we have observed experimentally are the same elements of sound production observed in early infancy. The infant vocalization data illustrate that laryngeal quality is primal, that control of the articulatory and acoustic cues of speech originate in the pharynx, and that the acquisition of the ability to produce manners of articulation spreads from the pharynx in a process that parallels and complements the ability of infants to discriminate speech-sound categories perceptually.

The teaching and learning of languages is also affected by this theoretical view of the vocal tract and of speech production in the larynx. Coarticulation, i.e. the presence of secondary or tertiary features, is shown to be endemic – an inherent and necessary property of how human speech is acquired. And the ontogeny of laryngeal phonetic development gives us a window on phylogeny – with the ability to explore sounds that have been misclassified or ignored until recently, and to place them in a context of vocal tract development and evolution.

All of the speech sounds in the voice quality taxonomy and in an expanded set of IPA consonants and vowels are presented in an iOS app – iPA Phonetics – which will be introduced and explained.


Some references:

Esling, John H. (1996). Pharyngeal consonants and the aryepiglottic sphincter. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 26, 65-88.

Esling, John H. (2005). There are no back vowels: The Laryngeal Articulator Model. Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 50, 13-44.

Edmondson, Jerold A., & John H. Esling (2006). The valves of the throat and their functioning in tone, vocal register, and stress: laryngoscopic case studies. Phonology, 23(2), 157-191.

Edmondson, Jerold A., Cécile M. Padayodi, Zeki Majeed Hassan & John H. Esling (2007). The laryngeal articulator: Source and resonator. In J. Trouvain & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, vol. 3 (pp. 2065-2068). Saarbrücken: Universität des Saarlandes.

Benner, Allison, Izabelle Grenon & John H. Esling (2007). Infants’ phonetic acquisition of voice quality parameters in the first year of life. In J. Trouvain & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, vol. 3 (pp. 2073-2076). Saarbrücken: Universität des Saarlandes.

Esling, John H. (2010). Phonetic notation. In William J. Hardcastle, John Laver & Fiona E. Gibbon (Eds.), The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences, 2nd ed. (pp. 678-702). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Moisik, Scott R. (2013) The Epilarynx in Speech. Doctoral dissertation, University of Victoria.

Moisik, Scott R., Hua Lin & John H. Esling. (2014). A study of laryngeal gestures in Mandarin citation tones using simultaneous laryngoscopy and laryngeal ultrasound (SLLUS). Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 44, 21-58.


App on the Apple Store:

Coey, Christopher, John H. Esling & Scott R. Moisik (2014). iPA Phonetics, Version 1.0 [2014]. Department of Linguistics, University of Victoria.

Scott R. Moisik, John H. Esling, Lise Crevier-Buchman, Angélique Amelot & Philippe Halimi (2015). Multimodal imaging of glottal stop and creaky voice: Evaluating the role of epilaryngeal constriction. Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (paper 247). Glasgow.