Honorof Douglas N, Whalen D H
Haskins Laboratories, 270 Crown Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2005 Apr;117(4 Pt 1):2193-200. doi: 10.1121/1.1841751.
Fundamental frequency (F0) is used for many purposes in speech, but its linguistic significance is based on its relation to the speaker's range, not its absolute value. While it may be that listeners can gauge a specific pitch relative to a speaker's range by recognizing it from experience, whether they can do the same for an unfamiliar voice is an open question. The present experiment explored that question. Twenty native speakers of English (10 male, 10 female) produced the vowel /a/ with a spoken (not sung) voice quality at varying pitches within their own ranges. Listeners then judged, without familiarization or context, where each isolated F0 lay within each speaker's range. Correlations were high both for the entire range (0.721) and for the range minus the extremes (0.609). Correlations were somewhat higher when the F0s were related to the range of all the speakers, either separated by sex (0.830) or pooled (0.848), but several factors discussed here may help account for this pattern. Regardless, the present data provide strong support for the hypothesis that listeners are able to locate an F0 reliably within a range without external context or prior exposure to a speaker's voice.
基频（F0）在言语中有多种用途，但其语言学意义基于它与说话者音域的关系，而非其绝对值。虽然听众可能通过经验识别出特定音高相对于说话者音域的情况，但对于不熟悉的声音他们是否能做到同样的事情仍是一个悬而未决的问题。本实验探讨了这个问题。20名以英语为母语的人（10名男性，10名女性）用口语（非歌唱）音质在各自音域内不同音高上发出元音/a/。然后听众在没有熟悉过程或语境的情况下判断每个孤立的F0在每个说话者音域中的位置。整个音域的相关性很高（0.721），去除极值后的音域相关性也很高（0.609）。当F0与所有说话者的音域相关时，按性别分开（0.830）或合并（0.848），相关性略高，但这里讨论的几个因素可能有助于解释这种模式。无论如何，目前的数据为以下假设提供了有力支持：听众能够在没有外部语境或事先接触说话者声音的情况下，在一个音域内可靠地定位F0。
