Fundamental frequency in sentence production : a study of Canadian French speech

This study has investigated patterns of fundamental frequency (FO) in the production of Canadian French sentences to determine how these patterns are influenced by syntactic structure and other variables. The investigation has centered on the FO topline (an important subset of the points in an FO contour), which has previously been shown to reveal information about a speaker’s representation of syntactic structures. The results show that FO patterns in Canadian French sentences are indeed influenced by syntactic structure. This influence is manifested by FO inflections at major syntactic boundaries. The locations of these major boundaries have been accurately predicted by an algorithm that determines boundary strengths based on syntactic structure. The FO patterns of French sentences are also affected by the declination effect. Every sentence examined in this study was characterized by a declining topline pattern, which has been attributed to a gradual decrease in subglottal air pressure. The declination effect in French has been modelled by an abstract mathematical rule and the results have been compared to those for a similar rule in American English. The lexical items of a sentence also have an effect on the FO topline in French sentences. However, this effect has not been found to result from the phonetic composition of the measured syllables, as proposed in previous studies. The influence of lexical items has instead been attributed to some measure of relative semantic weight. in addition to these variables, this study has examined the effect of two other factors on the FO patterns of Canadian French sentences. A change in sentence length has been found to have no influence on the starting and ending points of the FO topline. Additionally, it has been found that speakers having different FO ranges do not differ in the shape they give to the FO topline of a French sentence. On the basis of these results, a model has been proposed to account for FO patterns in sentence production. The limitations of the model have been enumerated and suggestions have been made for further studies of fundamental frequency in sentence production.