The Crosslinguistic Distribution of Vowel and Consonant Intrinsic F0 Effects

Vowels vary systematically in F0 based on intrinsic properties of the vowel (e.g. height: VF0) and preceding obstruent (e.g. voicing: CF0). These patterns have been attested in most languages studied, raising the possibility that they stem from physiological sources. However, previous results show a range of variability in maximum effect size and duration. One explanation is that variation could be learned and increased to enhance phonological contrasts or suppressed for functional reasons (e.g. for tone languages). Alternatively, differences could be due to physiological factors such as laryngeal contrast type. We map out the distribution of intrinsic F0 effects across twenty languages, using large corpora of read speech, operationalizing CF0 as the difference between stop series that most closely approximate phonologically ‘voiced’ and ‘voiceless’ stops. We find that both VF0 and CF0 effects are present and are in the same direction in all languages examined, but languages vary greatly in effect size. While some of this variability may be due to phonological properties of the languages (e.g. tone), and some variability in CF0 may be due to the diverse phonetic realizations of ‘voicing’ across languages, much of this variability remains to be explained. We find that the CF0 effect is consistently at least as large as the VF0 effect and is more variable across languages, suggesting a possible explanation for the tendency for CF0 effects to lead to sound change much more often than VF0 effects do. While our results on variability in CF0 effects rely on the validity of ‘lumping’ together diverse phonetic realizations, those on the robustness of CF0 and VF0 and on the variability in VF0 hold regardless. These results motivate further investigation to deepen our understanding of intrinsic F0 effects, their crosslinguistic distribution, and their role as precursors to sound change.