Is There a Relationship between Acoustic Vowel Space Size and Fundamental Frequency?

Differences in vowel formants in bass and tenor singers, as well as the perception of vowels synthesised at different fundamental frequencies predict that in a group of male or female speakers exhibiting a sufficiently wide range of average fundamental frequencies, there will be a positive correlation between the speakers’ average f0 and the dimensions of their acoustic vowel spaces. This hypothesis is tested using a group of 61 female German speakers producing the corner vowels in same-vowel sequences designed to elicit maximally peripheral vowels with intervocalic junctural glottalisation, in turn facilitating formant estimation. Significant weak positive correlations are found between different measures of average speaker f0 and acoustic vowel space dimensions suggesting that there is a relationship between speaker f0 and acoustic vowel space size. However, the linear component of the relationship accounts for only 10 % of the variance suggesting a number of other factors are at work.