Effects of speaking rate, sentential position, and coda voicing on formant frequency

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2011-10, Vol.130 (4_Supplement), p.2521-2521
• Main Authors: Evanini, Keelan, Ko, Eon-Suk
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.3655054

This study examines the effects of speaking rate, sentential position, and coda voicing on formant frequency values in English. Some previous studies have found gestural undershoot for formant target values in words with shorter durations, e.g., Lindblom (1963), although other studies have shown little to no effect of duration, e.g., Gay (1978), and the effects of the other factors are less-studied. This study examines formant frequencies of three different vowels (/i/, /e/, and /ae/) in CVC words containing both voiced and voiceless codas produced in three different sentence positions (initial, medial, and final) and three different speaking rates (slow, habitual, and fast). In total, seven speakers (five female and two male) of the Northern dialect of American English produced 1295 tokens, and vowel formant measurements were extracted at 1/3 of the duration of each vowel token. Separate linear regression analyses of the three vowels for the male and female speakers show that F1 and F2 target values do not vary systematically with vowel duration. In many cases, however, sentence position and coda voicing do have significant effects: in general, F1 and F2 values are more peripheral before voiced codas and in sentence-initial position.