Relative fundamental Frequency of voiced and voiceless stops and fricatives for different phonation types in normal French speakers

Camille Robieux (1) , Christine Meunier (1)

1 LPL - Laboratoire Parole et Langage

The relative fundamental frequency (RFF) was recently used to assess vocal effort in normal and dysphonic subjects since it reflects the vocal fold tension at the offset and onset of vowels with, in particular, lower values at the edges of voiced consonants compared to their voiceless counterparts. In this study, we explored the RFF variations according to the voicing status and the articulation manner of consonants, in several types of speech production known to involve different levels of vocal effort. Twelve native French speakers (6 females) with normal voice were asked to produce 24 trains of eight syllables in seven vocal conditions: spontaneous, low, high, soft, loud, breathy, and pressed voice. We consider the unaspirated voiceless and voiced consonants /p, b, f, v/ with the middle open vowel /a/. As expected, the RFF was lower for voiced than for voiceless consonants. In addition, it was lower for stops than for fricatives. The RFF was also lower for the high, loud and pressed condition while it was higher for the low, soft, and breathy conditions in comparison to the values for the spontaneous voice. The RFF measurement seems to be efficient to discern subtle levels of vocal effort in normal subjects.

Mots clés: Fundamental frequency F0; Vocal effort

Domaines: Linguistique

Camille Robieux, Christine Meunier. Relative fundamental Frequency of voiced and voiceless stops and fricatives for different phonation types in normal French speakers. 5th Joint Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and Acoustical Society of Japan, Nov 2016, Honolulu, United States. , 2016, 5th Joint Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and Acoustical Society of Japan. ⟨hal-01453113⟩