Laryngeal Adjustments for Vowel Devoicing in Japanese: An Electromyographic Study Hajime Hirose* Haskins Laboratories, New Haven It is well known that high vowels between voiceless consonants are often devoiced in many dialects of Japanese including Tokyo dialects (Bloch, 1950; Han, 1962). Previous studies with a fiberscope revealed that the glottis remained open for the devoiced vowel segments (Hirose, 1971a; Sawashima, 1969, 1971). Based on an electromyographic study of the activity of the vocalis muscle in articulation, the present author reported that de- voicing of Japanese vowels appears to be a matter concerning the neural pro- cess that determines the motor commands to the larynx (Hirose, 197la). In the present study, electromyographic activities of selected intrinsic laryn- geal muscles were examined with special reference to vowel devoicing in Jap- anese in comparison with the production of voiceless consonants. METHOD A speaker of the Tokyo dialect served as the subject in the present study and read randomized lists of test sentences sixteen times each. Each sentence embedded a test word in a frame "soreo -- to ju:" (That we call ~~). Table I lists the types of test words used in the experiment. They are all meaningful Japanese words. No accent kernel is attached to those words ex- cept for the last four pairs in the table, in which the position of the accent kernel is indicated by the mark "1." Devoicing typically occurs for all [1]'s between voiceless consonants as indicated in the table. Electromyographic recordings were made using hooked-wire electrodes. The wires used were insulated platinum-iridium alloy, the outer diameters of which were approximately 50 microns. The electrodes were inserted perorally using a curved probe into the posterior cricoarytenoid (PCA) and the inter- arytenoid (INT) by indirect laryngoscopy, while percutaneous approach was employed for insertion into the vocalis (VOC) and the cricothyroid (CT). Further description of the insertion techniques may be found in previous re- ports (Hirose, 1971a, b). The electromyographic signals were recorded on a multichannel data re~ corder together with acoustic signals and automatic timing markers. The sig- nals were reproduced, high-pass filtered, and fed into a computer after appro- priate rectification and integration. The electromyographic signals were averaged for more than fourteen selected utterances of each test sentence with reference to a line-up point on the time axis representing a predetermined ‘Also Faculty of Medicine, University of Tokyo 157(1) Words with no accent kernel [ sesse: [ sekdse: ] sekke: U sekdke: J C sekite: J] [ sette: U sjdse: U sytze: J C sydke: C sjige: C sdte: ( side: J C ssdne: Ckirt ] [ tenko: denko:] initial [s] .... 7 initial [s,] .... initial [2,] .... medial [k] .... 4 One for each, otherwise initial kgs ty dy sis, sik, sit, sin medial vere Seed, ty dh kis, kit, klk, ss, kk, tt, (2) Words with accent kernel Csert ] C ze eri J CT kesri J Ctest i] Caeit i] [ pa'su ) Table I: List of test words used in the present study. 158speech event. In the present experiment, voice onset following [t] in the frame " --- to yuu" in each sentence was taken for a line-up point. The data recording and the computer-processing system employed in the present exper- iment as described in more detail by Port (1971). RESULTS ‘The laryngeal adjustments in terms of the opening and closing gestures of the glottis for the voiced/voiceless distinction appeared to be executed by reciprocal activities of the abductor and adductor muscle groups of the larynx. In particular, the PCA consistently showed increasing activity for the voiceless portions of test utterances, while its activity was suppressed for the production of voiced segments. Conversely, INT activity appeared to be suppressed for voiceless portions and increased for voiced ones, thus pre~ senting a sort of inversion of the pattern of PCA activity throughout the utterance. Figure 1 illustrates an example of the averaged EMG curves of, from bottom to top, the PCA, the INT, and the VOC, for the utterance of [soreo zyike: to ju:] and of [soreo s,ige: to ju:], thus comparing the patterns of the muscle activity in respect to the [z,] vs. [s,] and [k] vs. [g] con- trasts. It is clearly demonstrated in both cases that there is a reciprocal pattern of activity between the PCA and the INT. In the case of [soreo s,ige: to ju:], for example, the PCA shows in creasing activity for the production of voiceless [s,] and [t] and remains suppressed for the rest of the test utterance. On the contrary, the INT shows a rapid decrease in activity for [s,] and [t], while it stays at high level for the rest. The timing of the peak PCA activity approximately coincides with that of the maximum suppression of INT activity. There is a shallow dip in the INT curve, apparently corresponding to [g] production. For the utterance of [soreo z,ike: to Ju:], the PCA shows increasing activity for [k] and [t] and suppressed activity for the rest. The INT shows a gradual decrease in activity for the sequence [zi], folloved by further suppression corresponding to increasing PCA activity. The activity of the VOC generally stays at a high level for the vowel portion of the utterance, while it becomes low for consonant segments regard- less of the voiced/voiceless distinction, although the activity is usually, but with some exceptions, somewhat higher for a voiced consonant than for a voiceless consonant if we compare the averaged EMG values for a given set of voiced/voiceless consonant pairs. Figure 2 compares the averaged EMG curves for the sentences embedding [sette:] vs. [sekjte:], where the interconsonantal [i] is devoiced in the latter. It is shown that PCA activity increases for the sequence [kjt] as well as for the geminate [tt] and initial [s], while the INT is markedly suppressed for these sequences. Jin the examples in Figure 1, VOC activity is higher for [g] than for [k] but lower for [z,] than for [8]. 159