Vowel Intrinsic Pitch in Connected Speech

Abstract We investigated whether ‘intrinsic pitch’ (IP) effects occur in connected speech. Fundamental frequency differences between German high and low vowels were measured in two different experimental conditions: (1) a typical laboratory task in which a carrier sentence served as a frame for test vowels; (2) a paragraph reading task in which test vowels occurred in a variety of prosodic environments. By comparing test vowels in comparable segmental and prosodic environments, it was shown that the IP effect does occur in connected speech, but that the size of the differences between high and low vowel fundamental frequency is somewhat smaller than in carrier sentences. Some tentative hypotheses are presented concerning the influence of prosodic environment on the magnitude of IP differences.