Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Comparative Study
. 2019 May;33(3):382.e21-382.e32.
doi: 10.1016/j.jvoice.2017.12.013. Epub 2018 Apr 9.

Registers in Infant Phonation

Eugene H Buder  1 , Valerie F McDaniel  2 , Edina R Bene  2 , Jennifer Ladmirault  2 , D Kimbrough Oller  2
Affiliations
Comparative Study

Registers in Infant Phonation

Eugene H Buder et al. J Voice. 2019 May.

Abstract

The primary vocal registers of modal, falsetto, and fry have been studied in adults but not per se in infancy. The vocal ligament is thought to play a critical role in the modal-falsetto contrast but is still developing during infancy (Tateya and Tateya, 2015).41 Cover tissues are also implicated in the modal-fry contrast, but the low fundamental frequency (fo) cutoff of 70 Hz, shared between genders, suggests a psychoacoustic basis for the contrast. Buder, Chorna, Oller, and Robinson (2008)6 used the labels of "loft," "modal," and "pulse" for distinct vibratory regimes that appear to be identifiable based on spectrographic inspection of harmonic structure and auditory judgments in infants, but this work did not supply acoustic measurements to verify which of these nominally labeled regimes resembled adult registers. In this report, we identify clear transitions between registers within infant vocalizations and measure these registers and their transitions for fo and relative harmonic amplitudes (H1-H2). By selectively sampling first-year vocalizations, this manuscript quantifies acoustic patterns that correspond to vocal fold vibration types not previously cataloged in infancy. Results support a developmental basis for vocal registers, revealing that a well-developed ligament is not needed for loft-modal quality shifts as seen in harmonic amplitude measures. Results also reveal that a distinctively pulsatile register can occur in infants at a much higher fo than expected on psychoacoustic grounds. Overall results are consistent with cover tissues in infancy that are, for vibratory purposes, highly compliant and readily detached.

Keywords: Falsetto; Infant vocal development; Modal; Registers; Vocal fry.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of interest: none.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Illustrations of RMS procedure for modal-pulse discrimination. Each panel, extracted from TF32, displays the waveform on top (c. 0.5 s), a narrowband spectrogram (c. 0–4kHz), and RMS amplitude with a 0.5 ms window. Label displays beneath the amplitude trace include “(--------)” codes indicating the segments of interest, also indicated by arrows. Panel (a) present a particularly clear example with only a brief transition gap, while Panel (b) presents the most difficult case encountered in this corpus, with an extended transition due to brief, intervening regimes and an unclear amplitude floor due to noise overlay. The samples are from different infants but both at the youngest age represented in the data.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Schematic of fo and H1-H2 measurement locations (‘waveform’ shapes in this schematic do not depict actual glottal waveforms and are merely intended to be evocative of register distinctions). Measurements were taken at ‘Mid’ locations for all three registers, and ‘Adjacent’ to loft-modal transitions. In pulse-modal transitions, transitional segments such as illustrated in Figure 1 were typically observed: For this reason, fo measures were still taken ‘adjacent’ to transitions, but H1-H2 measures were taken for pulse only ‘Near’ the transition. This latter criterion meant that for pulse a .5 ms windowed RMS contour had to reveal a continuous sequence of glottal pulses that were critically damped exhibiting temporal gaps for H1-H2 measurement.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Box and whisker plots depicting fo in (a) Hz and (b) semitones, measured mid-register.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Box and whisker plots depicting H1-H2, measured mid-register.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Fo transitions by type and direction. Error bars are standard errors.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Bar charts depicting H1-H2 transitions by type and direction
Figure 7
Figure 7
Scatterplot of all H1-H2 measures over fo (inclusive of mid-register, loft/modal adjacencies, pulse-adjacent modal, and modal-near pulse).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Tateya T, Tateya I. Regenerative Medicine in Otolaryngology. Springer; New York: 2015. Vocal fold development; pp. 161–169.
    1. Buder EH, Chorna L, Oller DK, Robinson R. Vibratory regime classification of infant phonation. J Voice. 2008;22:553–564. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Titze IR. Principles of Voice Production. Prentice Hall; Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 1994.
    1. Gordon M, Ladefoged P. Phonation types: A cross-linguistic overview. J Phon. 2001;29:383–406.
    1. Keating PA, Garellek M, Kreiman J. Acoustic properties of different kinds of creaky voice. Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences; Glasgow. 2015.

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources