Abstract
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">In the present small-scale preliminary study, we sampled four groups of younger and older female Arabic and English speakers to examine if speaking fundamental frequency (SFF) could show any systematic variations across languages and different age groups performing different tasks. All groups of speakers were recorded reading the North Wind and the Sun twice in their native language, and speaking spontaneously about themselves for around two minutes. Mean SFF values for each speaker and speaking task were obtained using Praat’s autocorrelation algorithm with a pitch range of 100-500Hz, with manual correction to remove spurious F0 values caused by doubling or halving the first harmonic. As well as presenting SFF results for all groups, mean values will be given for each group and speaking task. </span></p>
Highlights
Acoustic studies of speaking fundamental frequency (SFF) have shown that it can vary systematically across languages in ways which cannot be accounted for by speaker-specific physiology
3.1 Younger and older Arabic and English speakers It is clear from figure 1 that there are distinctly different fundamental frequency regions for the Arabic younger speaker when they read aloud compared to spontaneous speech
4.0 Discussion and conclusion Results show that the older Saudi Arabian women’s spontaneous speech averages 15.5Hz higher than their read speech (190.6Hz compared to 175.1Hz), while the opposite trend is evident with the younger women: their spontaneous speech averaged 206.8Hz, with their read speech averaging 218.2Hz, a difference of 13.4Hz
Summary
Acoustic studies of speaking fundamental frequency (SFF) have shown that it can vary systematically across languages in ways which cannot be accounted for by speaker-specific physiology. Mennen, Schaeffler & Docherty (2012) reported higher SFF for English females compared to German females by as much as 25Hz or more on certain kinds of phrase accents. Regarding the speaking task, Abu-Al-Makarem & Petrosino (2007) obtained results showing that the mean SFF of a group of fifteen Arabic-speaking males was on average 1.1Hz higher when reading aloud compared to spontaneous speech. They report this as a significant difference
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