Talker and language variation in the F0 of English, Mandarin and Mandarin-accented English

It is well known that fundamental frequency (F0) is modulated by talker-specific characteristics such as sex and individual physiology and that F0 can also be affected by speech style (e.g., Loveday 1981). However, even when controlling for these factors, F0 has been shown The aim of the current study is to examine how F0 is affected by the interaction of talker-specific and language-specific characteristics across speech styles in Mandarin, English, and Mandarin-accented English. The addition of a within-talker, between-language condition augments previous work that addresses only comparisons of native speech or native and accented speech; this condition also controls for talker-specific characteristics while varying language. This study is part of a larger research effort aimed at disentangling talker-and language-specific contributions to a wide range of global (i.e. non-contrastive) features of the speech signal in both the spectral and temporal domains. This study examines the F0 of two male talker populations across three language conditions: L1 English (EE) (N=8); and L1 Mandarin Chinese (MM) and L2 Mandarin-accented English (ME) from the same talkers (N=11). These measurements are from recordings of two tasks in Northwestern's ALLSSTAR corpus (Archive of L1 and L2 Scripted and Spontaneous Transcripts and Recordings, Bradlow et al. 2011): a short read passage (The North Wind and the Sun, NWS; IPA Handbook 1999) and approximately five minutes of spontaneous speech in response to question prompts (QNA). Using a linear mixed effects regression, we find main effects of language group and task on the mean (β lang =-11.9, p mean <0.05; β task =-19.6, p mean <0.01) and standard deviation (β lang =-29.5, p sd <0.01; β task =-34.3, p sd <0.01) of F0 (see Figure 1). The two-way interaction of language condition and task is also significant for mean (β lang:task =16.73, p mean <0.05) and standard deviation (β lang:task =37.8, p sd <0.05). Within-language condition comparisons show that the NWS-QNA difference is only significant for MM (β=-19.6, p mean <0.001); that is, mean F0 is a feature of Mandarin that varies robustly across speech style. Neither English nor Mandarin-accented English vary across style, and there is no significant difference in F0 ranges between English and Mandarin-accented English in either style. This indicates that L2 speakers of English (ME) are able to produce patterns of stylistic variation and F0 ranges that are similar to native English talker ranges for both tasks. In conjunction, there is a significant within-talker correlation …