Effect of language, speaking style and speaker sex on global measures of fundamental frequency

Abstract:

We analyze the effect of speaker sex, speaking style and language (English, Estonian, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish) on global statistical measures of the voice fundamental frequency. The styles studied are interview, sentence reading and word list reading. Typical F0 values used by speakers among languages differ both in male and female speakers. Sentence reading has slightly higher values than interview, but the effect is not uniform among languages. In few cases word reading and interview values differ significantly. All central tendency estimators are affected by the variables tested. Three out of five estimators of dispersion show slightly higher values for male than for female speakers. Among styles, the interview has higher standard deviation and coefficient of variation. Languages do not differ among themselves in terms of F0 variability.

Keywords:
Fundamental frequency; Acoustic phonetics; Speaking styles; Sociophonetics