Acoustic impact of the gradual glottal abduction degree on the production of fricatives: A numerical study.

The paper presents a numerical study about the acoustic impact of the gradual glottal opening on the production of fricatives. Sustained fricatives are simulated by using classic lumped circuit element methods to compute the propagation of the acoustic wave along the vocal tract. A recent glottis model is connected to the wave solver to simulate a partial abduction of the vocal folds during their self-oscillating cycles. Area functions of fricatives at the three places of articulation of French have been extracted from static MRI acquisitions. Simulations highlight the existence of three distinct regimes, named A, B, and C, depending on the degree of abduction of the glottis. They are characterized by the frication noise level: A exhibits a low frication noise level, B, which is a transitional unstable regime, is a mixed noise/voice signal, and C contains only frication noise. They have significant impacts on the first spectral moments. Simulations show that their boundaries depend on articulatory and glottal configurations. The transition regime B is shown to be unstable: it requires very specific configurations in comparison with other regimes, and acoustic features are very sensitive to small perturbations of the glottal configuration abduction in this regime.