Effects of obstruent voicing on vowel fundamental frequency in Dutch

Anne-France Pinget; Hugo Quené

doi:10.1121/10.0021070

Effects of obstruent voicing on vowel fundamental frequency in Dutch

Anne-France Pinget^*, Hugo Quené

^*Corresponding author for this work

ILS - Language acquisition, processing and disorders

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

It has been known for a long time and a wide variety of languages that vowel fundamental frequency (F0) following voiceless obstruents tends to be significantly higher than F0 following voiced obstruents. There has been a long-standing debate about the cause of this phenomenon. Some evidence in previous work is more compatible with an articulatory account of this effect, while others support the auditory enhancement account. This paper investigates these consonant-related F0 perturbations in Dutch after initial fricatives (/v, f/) and stops (/b, p/), as compared to after the nasal /m/. Dutch is particularly interesting because it is a “true voicing” language, and because fricatives are currently undergoing a process of devoicing. Results show that F0 was raised after voiceless, but largely unaffected after voiced obstruents. Fricative voicing in /v/ and F0 level tend to covary: the less voicing in /v/, the higher F0 at onset. There was no trace of an active gesture to explicitly lower pitch after highly devoiced fricatives, as would be predicted by an auditory account. In conclusion, F0 perturbations after Dutch obstruents and their covariation patterns are taken as additional evidence to support an articulatory cause of consonant-related F0 effects.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	2124-2136
Number of pages	13
Journal	Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Volume	154
Issue number	4
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0021070
Publication status	Published - 1 Oct 2023

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Acoustical Society of America.

Funding

We are very grateful to the anonymous reviewers for helping to clarify and improve this work. We thank the following institutes for providing recording facilities: the Department of Dutch Linguistics of Ghent University, the Leiden University Phonetics Laboratory, the Centre for Language and Cognition Groningen of the University of Groningen, the Department of Psychology of the Vrije Universiteit Brussels, and the Department of Linguistics of Radboud University Nijmegen. We also thank Stefano Coretta, Joseph Casillas, Timo Roettger, Martijn Wieling, and Cesko Voeten for their expert statistical guidance. Our interpretation of the results benefited from discussions with many colleagues, of whom we especially thank James Kirby, Jiayin Gao, René Kager, and Patrice Beddor. The data collection for this study was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO Grant No. 322-75-002).

Funders	Funder number
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek	322-75-002

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title = "Effects of obstruent voicing on vowel fundamental frequency in Dutch",

abstract = "It has been known for a long time and a wide variety of languages that vowel fundamental frequency (F0) following voiceless obstruents tends to be significantly higher than F0 following voiced obstruents. There has been a long-standing debate about the cause of this phenomenon. Some evidence in previous work is more compatible with an articulatory account of this effect, while others support the auditory enhancement account. This paper investigates these consonant-related F0 perturbations in Dutch after initial fricatives (/v, f/) and stops (/b, p/), as compared to after the nasal /m/. Dutch is particularly interesting because it is a “true voicing” language, and because fricatives are currently undergoing a process of devoicing. Results show that F0 was raised after voiceless, but largely unaffected after voiced obstruents. Fricative voicing in /v/ and F0 level tend to covary: the less voicing in /v/, the higher F0 at onset. There was no trace of an active gesture to explicitly lower pitch after highly devoiced fricatives, as would be predicted by an auditory account. In conclusion, F0 perturbations after Dutch obstruents and their covariation patterns are taken as additional evidence to support an articulatory cause of consonant-related F0 effects.",

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Effects of obstruent voicing on vowel fundamental frequency in Dutch

Abstract

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