Klaske van Sluis

CHAPTER 4 The acoustic contrast between the Dutch consonants /t/ and /d/ is reduced in tracheoesophageal speech Abstract The purpose of this study is to describe the acoustic changes of the consonants /t/ and /d/ in Dutch speaking individuals before and after total laryngectomy. The speech of seventeen participants was recorded before and after treatment. Eighteen tokens from a read-aloud text were obtained with /t/ or /d/ in initial position. Prevoicing, burst duration and duration of the vowel following the consonant were analyzed. The results show that the acoustic contrast of the /t/ and /d/ in initial position is reduced after treatment. Post-operatively, the presence of prevoicing of /d/ decreases, and burst duration increases. In the post-operative situation, therefore, /d/ becomes more similar to /t/ acousti- cally. 4.1 Introduction A total laryngectomy implicates surgical removal of the larynx. This procedure is mostly carried out because of advanced laryngeal cancer. With the removal of the larynx the natural voice is lost and individuals have to regain speech 0 Appeared as: van Sluis, K., Kapitein, M., van Son, R., Boersma, P. “The acoustic contrast between the Dutch consonants /t/ and /d/ is reduced in tracheoesophageal speech.” Proceed- ings of International Congress of Phonetic Sciences ICPhS 2019, 5-9 August, Melbourne, Australia , 2019.