The effects of vocal fatigue on vowel articulation in Cantonese-speaking females

Abstract

This study was designed to find out how vocal fatigue would influence the articulatory subsystem using vowel space area (VSA) as a measurement. Twenty-one female university undergraduates were randomly allocated to the Experimental Group (n=16) and Control Group (n=5). Participants in the Experimental Group participated in a loud reading task to induce vocal fatigue, whereas participants in the Control Group participated in a silent reading task. For each participant, recordings of corner vowels /a/, /i/, /u/, /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ of Cantonese tone 1 and tone 6, embedded in carrier phrases were made at four time-points. The first and second formant frequencies were analyzed from the corner vowels, which were then used to calculate the VSA. Results revealed that the VSA of the Experimental and the Control groups were similar with each other, and there were no significant differences in VSA before and after the vocal fatigue task. Interestingly, the VSA calculated using tone 6 vowels was significantly larger than the VSA calculated using tone 1 vowels.