Effects of obstruent voicing on vowel F0: Evidence from "true voicing" languages

This study investigates consonant-related F0 perturbations (‘CF0’) in French and Italian by comparing the effects of voiced and voiceless obstruents on F0 to those of voiced sonorants. The voiceless obstruents /p f/ in both languages are found to have F0-raising properties similar to American English voiceless obstruents, while F0 following the (pre)voiced obstruents /b v/ in French and Italian patterns together with /m/, again similar to English [Hanson, H. (2009). Effects of obstruent consonants on fundamental frequency at vowel onset in English. JASA 125(1), 425-441]. In both languages, F0 is significantly depressed, relative to sonorants, during the closure for voiced obstruents, but cannot be differentiated from sonorants following the release of oral constriction. These findings are taken as support for a model on which F0 perturbations are fundamentally the result of laryngeal maneuvers initiated to sustain or inhibit phonation, regardless of other language-particular aspects of phonetic realization.