Articulatory Configurations across Genders and Periods in French Radio and TV archives

TL;DR

This study analyzes how articulatory configurations in French media have evolved over 60 years across genders, revealing that certain vocal tract parameters remain gender-independent over time.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method of extracting articulatory parameters from large-scale media archives using acoustic-to-articulatory inversion and evaluates gender and temporal effects.

Findings

No significant gender differences in articulatory parameters over time.

Females did not lower their pitch over the decades.

Articulatory configurations are consistent across periods regardless of gender.

Abstract

This paper studies changes in articulatory configurations across genders and periods using an inversion from acoustic to articulatory parameters. From a diachronic corpus based on French media archives spanning 60 years from 1955 to 2015, automatic transcription and forced alignment allowed extracting the central frame of each vowel. More than one million frames were obtained from over a thousand speakers across gender and age categories. Their formants were used from these vocalic frames to fit the parameters of Maeda's articulatory model. Evaluations of the quality of these processes are provided. We focus here on two parameters of Maeda's model linked to total vocal tract length: the relative position of the larynx (higher for females) and the lips protrusion (more protruded for males). Implications for voice quality across genders are discussed. The effect across periods seems gender independent; thus, the assertion that females lowered their pitch with time is not supported.