Consonantal F0 perturbation in American English involves multiple mechanisms

Abstract

In this study we revisit consonantal perturbation of F0 in English, taking into particular consideration the effect of alignment of F0 contours to segments and F0 extraction method in the acoustic analysis.We recorded words differing in consonant voicing, manner of articulation and position in syllable, spoken by native speakers of American English in both statements and questions. In the analysis, we compared methods of F0 alignment, and found that the highest F0 consistency occurred when F0 contours were time-normalized to the entire syllable. Applying this method, along with using syllables with nasal consonants as the baseline and a fine-detailed F0 extraction procedure, we identified three distinct consonantal effects: a large but brief (10-40 ms) F0 raising at voice onset regardless of consonant voicing, a smaller but longer-lasting F0 raising effect by voiceless consonants throughout a large proportion of the following vowels, and a small lowering effect of around 6 Hz by voiced consonants, which was not found in previous studies. Additionally, a brief anticipatory effect was observed before a coda consonant. These effects are imposed on a continuously changing F0 curve that is either rising-falling or falling-rising, depending on whether the carrier sentence is a statement or a question.

Production and Perception of Mandarin Laryngeal Contrast: The Role of Post-plosive F0

“…The vertical dotted line is added to indicate the 35% threshold included in the statistical analysis. The f0 contours are timenormalized, aligned from the voicing onset to the vowel offset (see Xu and Xu, 2021, for the comparison between different alignments). Individual speakers' production data are presented in the Supplementary Materials.…”

F0 dynamics associated with prominence realisation in children with hearing impairment

“…277 Hz vs. 266 Hz. Although the differential effect of plosive voicing on the F0 of adjacent vowels is well-known and has been documented before (House & Fairbanks, 1953;Lehiste & Peterson, 1961;Xu & Xu, 2021), the finding of a significant difference in place of articulation of the voiceless plosives is new: the data in House & Fairbanks (1953) and Lehiste & Peterson (1961) show F0 differences of around 1 Hz between the two places of articulation.…”

Auditory and Phonetic Processes in Speech Perception

“…First, the tone recognition rates obtained in the present study may not directly reflect perception efficacy in real life. On the one hand, they could be too high because the f 0 contours tested here did not contain some of the known adverse effects like consonantal perturbation of f 0 [122,123], intonational confounds [99,124], etc. On the other hand, they could also be too low because not all tonal information is carried by f 0 .…”