The role of tone and phrasing in the occurrence of period doubling and vocal fry in Mandarin

Abstract

Period doubling, an under-studied yet frequently-occurring subtype of creaky voice, has distinct acoustic and phonatory properties compared to vocal fry, the most-studied and known subtype of creaky voice. Little is known about their distributional patterns across tones or utterances, let alone their potentially different functions in informing linguistic meaning and categories. In this paper, I investigate the tonal and phrasal influences on the distribution of these two voicing types as they occur sub-phonemically in Mandarin Chinese. The results show that both creak subtypes occur most frequently in Tones 3 and 2, and period doubling is more widespread across tones than vocal fry. Period doubling occurs most frequently at utterance edges, with its frequency gradually increasing toward the end of utterances, possibly reflecting vocal instability. Vocal fry, in contrast, is concentrated in the post- and pre-focal positions conditioned by the sentence-medial stimuli and in utterance-final positions, suggesting a stronger linguistic role in marking weak prosodic elements. This study also discusses implications for speech production and linguistic functions of different kinds of creak.