Elicitation context does not drive F0 lowering following voiced stops: Evidence from French and Italian

Abstract

Consonant-intrinsic F0 (CF0) effects are mainly the result of raising F0 following voiceless obstruents, rather than of lowering F0 following voiced obstruents. However, there are also documented instances where lowered F0 following voiced obstruents is enhanced. Given that both voicing and F0 are affected by prosodic context, it is possible that CF0 is lowered in some contexts but not others. This possibility is investigated by examining CF0 in French and Italian in isolated citation forms. Results are comparable to carrier-phrase contexts, where no F0 lowering after voiced obstruents is observed. Possible sources of the apparent cross-linguistic differences are discussed.

Consonantal F0 perturbation in American English involves multiple mechanisms

“…The present study is a further effort to improve the understanding of consonantal perturbation of F0. Recent studies (Hanson, 2009;Kirby and Ladd, 2016;Kirby et al, 2020) have already shown reduced support for the simple rise-fall dichotomy of F0 movement after voiced versus voiceless consonants (Hombert et al, 1979) illustrated in Figure 1. These studies have demonstrated the importance of using F0 of syllables with sonorant onsets as baseline when assessing the perturbation effect by obstruent consonants.…”

“…Aligning the F0 contours at syllable onset (Figure 7b) results in variations at the end of the syllable and the following contexts. When the F0 contours are aligned at both vowel onset and offset (Figure 7c), as done in Kirby and Ladd (2016), Kirby et al (2020), and Gao and Arai (2019), the amount of cross-consonant F0 difference is as large as in Figure 7a. Time normalizing F0 curves between the onset and offset of the target syllable (Figure 7d) seems to exhibit the least variable F0 patterns across consonant types both within the target syllable and in the surrounding carrier sentences.…”

“…Therefore, how F0 onsets are aligned to each other is a potential confound in the assessment of vertical perturbation. In previous studies (Chen, 2011;Chen et al, 2017;Lea, 1973;Hombert, 1978;Jun, 1996;Ohde, 1984), including also those that have used nasal consonants as reference (Hanson, 2009;Kirby and Ladd, 2016;Kirby et al, 2020), F0 contours have always been aligned at the onset of the vowel when estimating F0 perturbation, as in Figure 3c. They differ only in terms of whether there are additional alignment points and whether time-normalization is applied.…”

“…Some studies applied fixed time windows for the F0 contours under comparison: 80 ms in Chen (2011), 100 ms in Jun (1996) and 150 ms in Hanson (2009). Instead of fixed time windows, Kirby and Ladd (2016) and Kirby et al (2020) aligned the F0 contours at vowel onset and offset, and then applied time-normalization across the vowel. The same method was also used by Gao and Arai (2019).…”

Advancements of Phonetics in the 21st century: Quantitative data analysis

“…Informative priors can also specify likely values of a population-level effect. Kirby et al (2020) estimate the effect of preceding consonant voicing on F0 in French and Italian using using an informative prior encoding the effect's likely direction and magnitude, based on previous cross-linguistic studies (see also Labuschagne and Ciocca, 2020;Vasishth et al, 2018). This approach leverages the phonetics literature for more precise estimates.…”