Creak attributes in Mandarin tone perception

The complete work has been published in JASA online:

Huang, Y. (2020). Different attributes of creaky voice distinctly affect Mandarin tonal perception. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 147(3), 1441-1458.  

© 2020 Acoustical Society of America. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the Acoustical Society of America.

Part of the work was presented at the ICPhS 2019 in Melbourne, August 8. Click for paper.

Part of the work was presented at the LSA 2019 in New York, January 4. Click for slides.

The umbrella term "creaky voice" blurs the possible distinctions among various subtypes of creaky voice (Keating et al. 2015). However, besides the canonical acoustic features, namely, the combination of low-f0, noise, multiple-pulsed, and damped intensity, creaky voice can be characterized by finer-grained acoustic attributes. The role of different acoustic features of creak in tonal perception is under-explored. Using speech synthesis, I created stimuli of a single acoustic attribute, i.e., low-f0, irregular f0, double pulsing and constriction, each of them would contribute to a general percept of creaky voice, to test tonal identification and discrimination among Mandarin speakers.