PSYC 212 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Vocal Tract, Formant, Vocal Folds

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 212
• Professor: Mathieu Roy

Document Summary

Third step to speech production is articulation: changing the shape of our vocal tract to produce different phonemes. Changing size and shape of vocal tracts will inc/dec energy at diff frequencies. Peaks in the speech spectrum are called formants (f1, f2, f3) Formants are labelled by number from lowest to highest. Formants have higher frequencies for people who have shorter vocal tracts. It is the relationship between the formants that counts. Distribution will be shifted if you are a woman/child (smaller vocal tract, higher pitched) Ratio between the formants determines in the phoneme that you hear. Most of the time, the first 3 formants are sufficient to identify the phoneme. For step 2, phonation, we make sounds by pushing air through our vocal folds. Phonemes are produced when we add sound to this air going through the vocal tract after it goes through the vocal folds.