The contribution of the excitatory source to the perception of neutral vowels in stuttered speech

The vowel in part-word repetitions in stuttered speech often sounds neutralized. In the present article, measurements of the excitatory source made during such episodes of dysfluency are reported. These measurements show that, compared with fluent utterances, the glottal volume velocities are lower in amplitude and shorter in duration and that the energy occurs more towards the low-frequency end of the spectrum. In a first perceptual experiment, the effects of varying the amplitude and duration of the glottal source were assessed. The glottal volume velocity recordings of the /ae/ vowels used in the analyses were employed as driving sources for an articulatory synthesizer so that judgments about the vowel quality could be made. With dysfluent glottal sources (either as spoken or by editing a fluent source so that it was low in amplitude and brief), the vowels sounded more neutralized than with fluent glottal sources (as spoken or by editing a dysfluent source to increase its amplitude and lengthen it). In a second perceptual experiment, synthetic glottal volume velocities were used to verify these findings and to assess the influence of the low-frequency emphasis in the dysfluent speech. This experiment showed that spectral bias and duration both cause stuttered vowels to sound neutralized.