Age vectors vs. axes of intraspeaker variation in vowel formants measured automatically from several English speech corpora.

Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019

Authors

Jeff Mielke

Erik R Thomas

Josef Fruehwald

Michael McAuliffe

Morgan Sonderegger

Jane Stuart-Smith

Robin Dodsworth

Published

2019

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.

Citation

BibTeX citation:

@article{mielke2019,
  author = {Mielke, Jeff and Thomas, Erik R and Fruehwald, Josef and
    McAuliffe, Michael and Sonderegger, Morgan and Stuart-Smith, Jane
    and Dodsworth, Robin},
  title = {Age Vectors Vs. Axes of Intraspeaker Variation in Vowel
    Formants Measured Automatically from Several {English} Speech
    Corpora.},
  journal = {Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic
    Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019},
  date = {2019},
  url = {https://assta.org/proceedings/ICPhS2019/papers/ICPhS_1307.pdf},
  langid = {en},
  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.}
}

For attribution, please cite this work as:

Mielke, Jeff, Erik R Thomas, Josef Fruehwald, Michael McAuliffe, Morgan Sonderegger, Jane Stuart-Smith, and Robin Dodsworth. 2019. “Age Vectors Vs. Axes of Intraspeaker Variation in Vowel Formants Measured Automatically from Several English Speech Corpora.” Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019. https://assta.org/proceedings/ICPhS2019/papers/ICPhS_1307.pdf.