Age Vectors vs. Axes of Intraspeaker Variation in Vowel Formants Measured Automatically From Several English Speech Corpora

Mielke, J., Thomas, E. R., Fruehwald, J., McAuliffe, M., Sonderegger, M., Stuart-Smith, J. and Dodsworth, R. (2019) Age Vectors vs. Axes of Intraspeaker Variation in Vowel Formants Measured Automatically From Several English Speech Corpora. In: International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019), Melbourne, Australia, 5-9 Aug 2019, pp. 1258-1262. ISBN 9780646800691

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Abstract

To test the hypothesis that intraspeaker variation in vowel formants is related to the direction of diachronic change, we compare the direction of change in apparent time with the axis of intraspeaker variation in F1 and F2 for vowel phonemes in several corpora of North American and Scottish English. These vowels were measured automatically with a scheme (tested on hand-measured vowels) that considers the frequency, bandwidth, and amplitude of the first three formants in reference to a prototype. In the corpus data, we find that the axis of intraspeaker variation is typically aligned vertically, presumably corresponding to the degree of jaw opening for individual tokens, but for the North American GOOSE vowel, the axis of intraspeaker variation is aligned with the (horizontal) axis of diachronic change for this vowel across North America. This may help to explain why fronting and unrounding of high back vowels are common shifts across languages.

Item Type:Conference Proceedings
Status:Published
Refereed:Yes
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Stuart-Smith, Professor Jane
Authors: Mielke, J., Thomas, E. R., Fruehwald, J., McAuliffe, M., Sonderegger, M., Stuart-Smith, J., and Dodsworth, R.
Subjects:P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
College/School:College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Language and Linguistics
ISSN:0241-0669
ISBN:9780646800691
Copyright Holders:Copyright © 2019 Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.
First Published:First published in Sasha Calhoun, Paola Escudero, Marija Tabain & Paul Warren (eds.) Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019 pp. 1258-1262
Publisher Policy:Reproduced under a Creative Commons license
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Project CodeAward NoProject NamePrincipal InvestigatorFunder's NameFunder RefLead Dept
3001610SPeech Across Dialects of English (SPADE): large-scale digital analysis of a spoken language across space and timeJane Stuart-SmithEconomic and Social Research Council (ESRC)ES/R003963/1Arts - English Language and Linguistics