Intrinsic Variations in the Speech Signal

Fundamental frequency as a cue to postvocalic consonantal voicing: Some data from speech perception and production

“…Mohr (1971) used three speakers, none of whom were native speakers of English, and found, in agreement with the present results, that the FO contour was not influenced by the voicing value of a postvocalic consonant. Similar results have been reported by Lea (1973), who used just two speakers and a corpus of test items that included many English nonwords.…”

“…That the perceptual system knows something about such physiologically determined cue is not surprising. The results of our production study and the earlier findings of Lea (1973) and Mohr (1971) all argue against the hypothesis that a similar phenomenon is responsible for the perceptual deployment of the FO contour as a reliable cue to postvocalic voicing in stops and fricatives. If inherent articulatory mechanisms dictated greater amounts of change in FO before voiced than voiceless consonants, we would expect speakers to produce these larger changes, regardless of their native language or the specific corpus of test words examined.…”

“…Since FO contour is used by English listeners as a perceptual cue to post vocalic consonantal voicing, as evidenced by the results of Oerr and Massaro (1980), Lehiste (Note 3), and Experiments 1 and 2, we would expect English speakers to produce this cue when speaking English. The production data of Lea (1973) and Mohr (1971) are not inconsistent with this prediction, since Lea's corpus included a large number of English nonwords and Mohr's study did not use native speakers of English. Experiment 3, which employed only native English speakers and a corpus consisting entirely of English words, failed to find evidence of a consistent effect of postvocalic consonantal voicing on speakers' productions of FO contours and therefore argues against this hypothesis.…”

“…An FO contour that is high and falling during the early portion of the vowel indicates that the preceding consonant was voiceless, whereas a low and rising FO indicates a voiced consonant. Studies of speech production have indicated that the differing FO contours associated with voiced and voiceless consonants are due to physiological constraints inherent in articulation, particularly differences in subglottal pressure immediately after the release of the consonant (Mohr, 1971). That the perceptual system knows something about such physiologically determined cue is not surprising.…”

Influence of fundamental frequency on stop-consonant voicing perception: A case of learned covariation or auditory enhancement?

“…However, cross-linguistic analysis demonstrates that f 0 and the acoustic correlates of voice onset time ͑VOT͒ covary only among consonants that are used distinctively by languages ͑Kohler, 1982languages ͑Kohler, , 1984languages ͑Kohler, , 1985Kingston, 1986;Kingston and Diehl, 1994͒, thus suggesting that the influence is not a mandatory consequence of the speech-production system. Vowels immediately following voiced consonants ͑e.g., ͓b͔, ͓d͔, ͓g͔͒ tend to have lower f 0's than those following voiceless consonants ͑e.g., ͓p͔, ͓t͔, ͓k͔; House and Fairbanks, 1953;Lehiste and Peterson, 1961;Mohr, 1971;Hombert, 1978;Caisse, 1982;Peterson, 1983;Ohde, 1984͒. 1 For example, the fundamental frequency of the vowel ͓#͔ ͑as in bud͒ tends to be lower in the utterance ͓$#͔ than in the syllable ͓##͔ ͑Kingston and Diehl, 1994͒. The covariation between f 0 and voicing 2 in language production has a corresponding regularity in speech perception. When listeners categorize synthetic or digitally manipulated natural speech tokens of a phonetic series varying perceptually from voiced to voiceless ͑e.g., from ͓ba͔ to ͓pa͔͒ listeners more often identify tokens as voiced ͑i.e., as ͓ba͔͒ when f 0 is low.…”