Lecture: Consonant F0 effects. A case study on Catalan

In many languages of the world, it has been consistently observed that vowels differ in their fundamental frequency (F0) due to intrinsic characteristics, such as their height but also due to extrinsic factors such as preceding segments. In the case of the latter, voiceless obstruents generally increase the F0 values of the following vowel while voiced obstruents tend to decrease it (House and Fairbanks 1953, Lehiste and Peterson 1961). The phenomenon, widely considered to be a phonetic universal, has been proposed in the literature to be caused by automatic but also controlled factors through so-called ‘phonetic knowledge’ (Kingston and Diehl, 1994). True large-scale investigation of this phenomenon has, however, been limited. In this study, we investigated consonant F0 effects (henceforth CF0) in the Catalan vowel system using a large-scale speech corpus. We employed the Common Voice Catalan Dataset with around 240 hours of recordings and more than 32.000 individual vowel segments from 200 Catalan speakers (Ardila et al., 2020). The methodology employed for curating and extracting the measurements is described in the VoxCommunis Corpus (Ahn and Chodroff, 2022). We found that voiceless obstruents preceding vowels significantly increased vowel F0 values as compared to voiced obstruents, confirming the existence of CF0 in the Catalan vowel system. Moreover, we found a robust and highly significant positive correlation between the mean onset F0 values following voiceless and voiced stops across speakers, indicating a predictable difference across speakers (r = 0.82, p < 0.001). A simple linear regression revealed that the difference tended to decrease as F0 increased. Overall, the results of our study reinforce the validity of extant observations on CF0 effects cross-linguistically by making use of a large, freely accessible database, highlighting the potential of multilingual large corpora for investigating possible phonetic universals.

Info

Day: 2023-10-27
Start time: 15:00
Duration: 00:25
Room: NIG Raum 2
Track: Phonetics and Phonology
Language: en

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