Cross-language comparison of F0 range in speakers of native Chinese, native Japanese and Chinese L2 of Japanese: Preliminary results of a corpus-based analysis

Abstract

This paper presents several findings in comparison of F0 range in Chinese speech by native Chinese speakers (CC), Chinese Speech by Japanese learners (CJ) and Japanese speech by native Japanese speakers (JJ). The purpose of this work as a whole is to investigate possible F0 range difference between Chinese L1 and L2 and examine whether this difference is correlated with their Japanese L1. “Long term distributional” (LTD) measures were adopted, calculated in both sentence and speaker level, and analysis was conducted on a relatively large corpus. Results showed an overall tendency of cross-language differences in the chosen LTD measures suggesting that: 1) F0 range is larger and F0 register higher in native Chinese speech than native Japanese speech; 2) Chinese L2 has a narrower F0 range and lower F0 register than native Chinese speech; 3) Moreover, F0 distribution (kurtosis & skewness) results uncovered a phenomenon that despite the relative consistent trend of narrower F0 range in L2 speakers, it is highly speaker dependent of whether to narrow the upper or lower part of their speaking F0 range.