F-pattern Analysis of Professional Imitations of "hallå" in three Swedish Dialects

We describe preliminary results of an acoustic-phonetic study of voice imitations, which is ultimately aimed towards developing an explanatory approach to similar-sounding voices. Such voices are readily obtained by way of imitations, which were elicited by asking an adult-male, professional imitator to utter two tokens of the Swedish word “hallå” in a telephone-answering situation and three Swedish dialects (Gothenburg, Stockholm, Skania). Formant-frequency (F1, F2, F3, F4) patterns were measured at several landmarks of the main phonetic segments (‘a’, ‘l’, ‘å’), and cross-examined using the imitator’s token-averaged F-pattern and those obtained by imitation. The final ‘å’-segment seems to carry the bulk of differences across imitations, and between the imitator’s patterns and those of his imitations. There is however a notable constancy in F1 and F2 from the ‘a’-segment nearly to the end of the ‘l’-segment, where the imitator seems to have had fewer degrees of articulatory freedom.