Intrinsic F0 in tense and lax vowels with special reference to German

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to show that the observation which is the starting point for almost all attempts at explaining intrinsic fundamental frequency (intrinsic F0) in vowels, i.e. that it is correlated with vowel height (interpreted as tongue height), does not hold if short lax vowels are included, since they have a considerably lower tongue height but practically the same F0 as their corresponding tense counterparts. Section 1 contains a discussion of some explanations of intrinsic F0 and vowel height and a short exposition of its connection with other vowel features. Section 2 gives a survey of the properties of tense and lax vowels based on data from the phonetic literature. Section 3 reports on an investigation of German tense and lax front unrounded vowels, including duration, tongue height, jaw opening, vertical lip opening, formant frequencies, and F0. Section 4 contains a discussion of various possible explanations of the results.