The Effect of Vocal Effort on Contrastive Voice Quality in Shaoxing Wu

Voice quality varies at different levels of communication functions. In order to better understand the range of voice quality variation in normal speech, it is important to examine the interaction between global functions and local functions. This study investigates the effect of vocal effort on the contrastive voice quality in Shaoxing Wu. Results show that register contrasts are maintained in all vocal effort conditions, suggesting that the controls for global vs local functions are rather independent. However, the contrastivity of the registers is modulated by the vocal effort conditions, and the register contrasts are less well-defined in the loud and soft conditions.