Fundamental frequency variability in the oral reading of untrained English speakers

Abstract

A characteristic common to the speech of virtually all individuals with dysarthria (a motor speech disorder) is “monopitch” or “monotone”; yet many such patients possess variations in fundamental frequency (F0) that are perceptually apparent and instrumentally demonstrable. In an attempt to establish reference data for the degree of F0 variability in the oral reading of normal English speakers, 76 randomly selected, naive native speakers of American English were asked to read aloud a standard paragraph used to assess contextual speech in both normal and deviant speakers (the “Grandfather” passage) as part of a study correlating perceptual and acoustic measures of expressiveness in speaking. Selected sentences of the tape‐recorded paragraphs were visually inspected on a real‐time F0 analyzer (the Visi‐pitch), with measurements made (wherever possible) at regularly occurring intervals in the sentence. Mean F0's for each sentence were then calculated as well as standard deviations, which reveal the degree of departure from a theoretical monotone (s.d. = 0). These data along with details of instructions to subjects and acoustical analysis techniques used will be presented.