Word Frequency Effects on Duration and F0 in English Homophone Utterances

We investigate whether the word frequency effects occur in native speakers' homophone speech in such a way that less frequent words are produced with greater magnitudes in duration and F0 than more frequent words. Acoustic analyses of homophone data produced by four speakers reveal that there is a tendency that vowels in less frequent words get longer than those in more frequent words, and statistical tests verify the significance of their differences. On the other hand, no considerable correlation has been discovered between F0 and word frequency.