Shapes of Vowel F0 Contours Influenced by Preceding Obstruents of Different Types - Automatic Analyses Using Tilt Parameters-

The fundamental frequency of a vowel is known to be affected by the identity of the preceding consonant. The general agreement is that strong consonants trigger higher F0 than weak consonants. However, there has been a disagreement on the shape of this segmentally affected F0 contours. Some studies report that shapes of contours are differentiated based on the consonant type, but others regard this observation as misleading. This research attempts to resolve this controversy by investigating shapes and slopes of F0 contours of Korean word level speech data produced by four male speakers. Instead of entirely relying on traditional human intuition and judgment, I employed an automatic F0 contour analysis technique known as tilt parameterisation (Taylor 2000). After necessary manipulation of an F0 contour of each data token, various parameters are collapsed into a single tilt value which directly indicates the shape of the contour. The result, in terms of statistical inference, shows that it is not viable to conclude that the type of consonant is significantly related to the shape of F0 contour. A supplementary measurement is also made to see if the slope of each contour bears meaningful information. Unlike shapes themselves, slopes are suspected to be practically more practical for consonantal differentiation, although confirmation is required through further refined experiments.