Tone production by the speakers of different age-and-gender groups

This paper is an acoustic analysis of the pitch/F0 of the six long tones [55 33 22 21 25 23] in Cantonese produced by the male and female adult speakers and male and female child speakers. Results show that (i) the F0 patterns of the Cantonese tones for the speakers of different age-and-gender groups are similar, but the absolute F0 values differ. (ii) The difference in F0 between the adult and child speakers is large, but less between the child and female adult speakers. (iii) The difference in F0 is noticeable between the adult speakers of different genders, but not between the male and female child speakers. (iv) The difference in F0 across the speaker groups is uniformly scaled for different tone types. And (v) for all the six tones, the F0 value for the child speakers is approximately an octave higher than that for the male adult speakers and 1.2 to 1.3 times higher than that of the female adult speakers, and the F0 for the female adult speakers is slightly over a half octave higher than the F0 for the male adult speakers.