Twenty years after the publication of a special issue in this journal on non-modal phonation (JPhon 2001: 49(4)), the phonetic study of voice quality has shown impressive progress. Here I focus on what we have learnt over these years about the linguistic sources of voice quality modulation. I stress how voice quality has a role to play in all of speech: among its many functions, the voice is involved in the articulation of all sounds, and voice quality is worth investigating as much for “modal” consonants and vowels as for contrastive phonation type. The voice also encodes structure at many prosodic levels: sub-lexical, lexical, and post-lexical. I further highlight some of the important technological developments and refinement of various voice quality models that have led to progress in the phonetic study of voice quality. Reviewing all of the above, one can only conclude that human voice has a central role to play in the phonetician’s pursuit towards understanding spoken language.

在这本杂志上发表关于非模态发声的特刊二十年后（JPhon2001: 49(4))，语音质量的语音研究取得了令人瞩目的进展。在这里，我将重点介绍这些年来我们所学到的关于语音质量调制的语言来源的知识。我强调语音质量如何在所有语音中发挥作用：在语音的众多功能中，语音涉及所有声音的发音，语音质量对于“模态”辅音和元音和对比发声一样值得研究类型。声音还在许多韵律层次上编码结构：亚词汇、词汇和后词汇。我进一步强调了一些重要的技术发展和各种语音质量模型的改进，这些模型导致语音质量的语音研究取得了进展。综观以上所有，