Unintended imitation of fundamental frequency in female speakers

Objective: Former studies have shown that humans unintentionally adopt speech characteristics from their conversation partners, a phenomenon known as speech convergence. This study investigated imitation of fundamental frequency (F_o) in nine healthy females in a repetition task.Method: The design included two conditions; loud reading (baseline) and repetition after a model talker. The model talker was a female with a high-pitched voice and stimuli included both words and nonwords. All productions were analyzed with regard to mean and SD of F_o and compared between conditions and word types.Results: The participants showed different patterns regarding the effect on F_o, thus indicating that some individuals are more likely to change their speaking F_o in a repetition task than others. Group results showed somewhat but not significantly higher mean F_o in the repetition task as compared to baseline (reading). Moreover, nonwords were produced with a significantly higher mean F_o than real words, in both reading and repetition conditions. No interaction effect between condition and word type was found.