Pitch Range Data for Native and Non-Native Plain and Lombard Speech

Extensive research on native Lombard speech does not consider that non-natives experience a higher cognitive load while producing speech and that the native language may influence the non-native speech. We investigated pitch range in plain and Lombard speech in native and non-natives.

Dutch and American-English speakers read contrastive question-answer pairs in quiet and in noise in English, while the Dutch also read Dutch sentence pairs. We found that Lombard speech is characterized by a wider pitch range than plain speech, for all speakers (native English, non-native English, and native Dutch). This shows that non-natives also widen their pitch range in Lombard speech.