On the interaction between fundamental frequency and articulatory setting
Timothy Habick · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1981
Despite the apparent implications of much current research [P. Ladefoged et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 64, 1027–1035 (1978)], fundamental frequency plays an important role in determining the levels of a speaker's formant frequencies, since F0 affects the articulatory setting that a speaker habitually chooses for speech. On the basis of a spectrographic analysis of the speech of 40 subjects from one speech community, the size and location of the phonemic system in two-formant acoustic space will be shown to vary as a function of three major parameters: Fundamental frequency, social forces (both determining articulatory setting), and the invariable dimensions of the vocal tract. In addition, several competing theories of this aspect of speech perception will be rejected. Specifically, the assertion that listeners calculate the size of speakers' vocal tracts in order to decode their speech will be argued against.