Consonant-f0 interaction under predictable voicing: f0 lowering due to phonetic factors

Abstract

We report on consonant-f0 interactions in Malayalam. Crosslinguistically, voicing lowers f0 in the following vowel (House and Fairbanks 1953, Hombert 1978, Clements 2002, Moreton 2006). While this lowering has been attributed to physiological and phonetic factors (Stevens 1998, Atkinson 1978, and Honda 2004), Ohde (1984), Svantesson and House (2006), and Keating (1984) have argued that f0 lowering serves to maintain a phonological contrast between voiced and voiceless segments. Voicing in Malayalam is predictable; voiceless stops appear initially, and voiced intervocalically. We report on data from 6 native speakers. 3 repetitions of each word in a frame sentence were recorded. Since Malayalam words only appear with voiceless initial stops, we contrast these with nasals from corresponding places of articulation. We examine time-normalized f0 perturbation due to voicing in Malayalam for all places of articulation for both initial and medial contexts. Our findings lend support to the physiological and phonetic account of f0 lowering. Malayalam exhibits a pattern of f0 lowering following voicing and raising during the production of voiceless segments. In spite of Malayalam voicing being predictable, the f0 perturbation in the following vowel follows the cross-linguistic pattern of lowering following voiced segments. This finding dove-tails with the results from earlier studies that take physiological factors to be responsible for the lowering of f0 following voiced segments.