The cross-linguistic distribution of vowel and consonant intrinsic F0 effects

Abstract

It is well known that vowels vary systematically in F0 based on intrinsic properties of the vowel itself and the preceding obstruent: F0 tends to be higher for high vowels compared to low vowels and F0 following voiceless obstruents tends to be higher than F0 following voiced obstruents. Within the vast literature investigating these vowel intrinsic F0 (VF0) and consonant intrinsic F0 (CF0) effects, these patterns have been individually attested in most of the languages in which it has been studied, raising the possibility that these stem from physiological sources and will result in similar effect size and duration across languages. However, the details of previous results show a range of variability in trajectory across studies, both in the maximum effect size and how long the effect persists across the vowel, which has been explained as resulting from enhancement of phonological contrasts or suppression due to contrastive F0 (i.e., tone languages). The present study maps out the distribution of intrinsic F0 effects across 16 languages, using large corpora of read speech. We find that both VF0 and CF0 effects are robust, with the effects present and in the same direction in all 16 languages examined, but that languages vary greatly in VF0 and CF0 effect size. A few languages have either VF0 or CF0 effects that are substantially larger than other languages, suggesting the possibility of enhancement, while a few languages have both VF0 and CF0 much smaller than normal, suggesting the possibility of suppression, but most of this variability appears to be unexplained by phonological properties of the language (e.g. tone). Finally, we find that the CF0 effect is larger than the VF0 effect in almost every language, and the CF0 effect is more variable across languages. These patterns suggest a possible explanation for the cross-linguistic tendency for CF0 effects to lead to sound change (''tonogenesis'') much more often than VF0 effects. Overall, these results contribute to our understanding of intrinsic F0 effects, their cross-linguistic distribution, and their role as precursors to sound change.