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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Age vectors vs. axes of intraspeaker variation in vowel formants measured automatically from several English speech corpora
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.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1730479
- PAR ID:
- 10139124
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Congress of Phonetic Sciences
- Volume:
- 19
- ISSN:
- 2412-0669
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1258-1262
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Southern American English is spoken in a large geographic region in the United States. Its characteristics include back-vowel fronting (e.g., in goose, foot, and goat), which has been ongoing since the mid-nineteenth century; meanwhile, the low back vowels (in lot and thought) have recently merged in some areas. We investigate these five vowels in the Digital Archive of Southern Speech, a legacy corpus of linguistic interviews with sixty-four speakers born 1886-1956. We extracted 89,367 vowel tokens and used generalized additive mixed-effects models to test for socially-driven changes to both their relative phonetic placements and the shapes of their formant trajectories. Our results reinforce previous descriptions of Southern vowels while contributing additional phonetic detail about their trajectories. Goose-fronting is a change in progress, with greatest fronting after coronal consonants. Goat is quite dynamic; it lowers and fronts in apparent time. Generally, women have more fronted realizations than men. Foot is largely monophthongal, and stable across time. Lot and thought are distinct and unmerged, occupying different regions of the vowel space. While their relative positions change across generations, all five vowels show a remarkable consistency in formant trajectory shapes across time. This study’s results reveal social and phonetic details about the back vowels of Southerners born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: goose-fronting was well underway, goat-fronting was beginning, but foot remained backed, and the low back vowels were unmerged.
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