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Vowels vary in their acoustic similarity across regional dialects of American English, such that some vowels are more similar to one another in some dialects than others. Acoustic vowel distance measures typically evaluate vowel similarity at a discrete time point, resulting in distance estimates that may not fully capture vowel similarity in formant trajectory dynamics. In the current study, language and accent distance measures, which evaluate acoustic distances between talkers over time, were applied to the evaluation of vowel category similarity within talkers. These vowel category distances were then compared across dialects, and their utility in capturing predicted patterns of regional dialect variation in American English was examined. Dynamic time warping of mel-frequency cepstral coefficients was used to assess acoustic distance across the frequency spectrum and captured predicted Southern American English vowel similarity. Root-mean-square distance and generalized additive mixed models were used to assess acoustic distance for selected formant trajectories and captured predicted Southern, New England, and Northern American English vowel similarity. Generalized additive mixed models captured the most predicted variation, but, unlike the other measures, do not return a single acoustic distance value. All three measures are potentially useful for understanding variation in vowel category similarity across dialects.
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Large-scale acoustic analysis of dialectal and social factors in English /s/-retraction
The retraction of /s/ in /str/, eg street, is a sound change found in certain English dialects. Previous work suggests that /s/-retraction arises from lower spectral frequency /s/ in /str/. The extent to which /s/-retraction differs across English dialects is unclear. This paper presents results from a large-scale, acoustic phonetic study of sibilants in 420 speakers, from 6 spontaneous speech corpora (9 dialects) of North American and Scottish English. Spectral Centre of Gravity was modelled from automatic measures of word-initial sibilants. Female speakers show higher frequency sibilants than males, but more so for /s/ than /ʃ/; /s/ is also higher in American than Canadian/Scottish dialects; /ʃ/ is surprisingly variable. /s/-retraction, modelled as retraction ratios, is generally greater for /str/ than /spr skr/, but varies by dialect; females show more retraction in /str/ than males. Dialectal and social factors clearly influence /s/-retraction in English clusters /sp st sk/, /spr skr/, and /str/.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1730479
- PAR ID:
- 10139123
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Congress of Phonetic Sciences
- Volume:
- 19
- ISSN:
- 2412-0669
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1273-1277
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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