Gender and age based f0-variation in the German Plapper Corpus

This study is the first exploration of data collected with the smartphone-app Plapper with which participants from Germany recorded themselves reading several sentences containing target sounds for future analyses of differences in fine phonetic detail and then donated their speech for inclusion to a large speech corpus. To this date, just short of 2.000 participants have contributed to this corpus. First analyses of differences in f0 on read speech from these German participants reveals an effect of age on mean f0 in females only and additional effects of self-rated femininity/masculinity (higher mean f0 in male and female speakers with higher self-rated femininity scores and vice versa). Also, there is an effect of region with speakers in the north of Germany inexplicably having lower mean f0 values than speakers from the other regions. Results leave room for speculation on the social meaning (what do speakers code and what do listeners interpret) of differences in f0.