A PARAMETRIC MODEL OF AUSTRALIAN ENGLISH VOWELS IN FORMANT SPACE
Michael Barlow and Frantz Clermont
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Abstract This paper concerns the development of a parametric model for characterising the formant (F1 -F3—F3) space of three sociolinguistic varieties (Broad, General and Cultivated) of spoken vowels in Australian English. The vowel-formant space is modelled as a quadratic surface, which captures the non-linearity in the F3 dimension and yields a parametric formulation for F3 as a weighted combination of F1 and F2. Differences between the surfaces, together with their application for prediction/classification on a per-speaker basis provide a holistic quantification of the differences between the varieties of Australian English.
SEEING IS BELIEVING: BEYOND A STATIC 2D-VIEW OF FORMANT SPACE FOR SPEECH RESEARCH AND EDUCATION
Michael Barlow and Frantz Clermont
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Abstract The paper describes an online resource developed for the dual purpose of education and research in speech science and technology. The resource consists of three- dimensional (3D) interactive worlds, which are currently based on formant databases and can be used not only to demonstrate familiar phenomena but also to gain new insights from within less constrained spaces. The resource’s construction and availability are described, together with examples of some of the phenomena manifest in spoken vowels. Results of employing the resource in an undergraduate course in speech processing suggest that the 3D interactive approach not only is more appealing and natural than two-dimensional (2D), numeric approaches to teaching the same material, but it also enhances learning.
DIFFERENCES IN VOWEL QUALITY IN TWO CATALAN DIALECTS DATA FROM MDS
Josefina Carrera-Sabat Ana M. Fernandez-Planas, Josep Matas-Crespo and Alicia Ortega-Escandell
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Abstract Phonetic descriptions which concern themselves with dialectal distinctions have different goals: a) general descriptions of all the linguistic domain and b) more specific detail focusing on the differences between dialects, such as "llerdata" and "barceloni". Following this second line of dialectal contrast, this paper alms at demonstrating acoustical differences of openness between the middle vowels of the anterior series of two Catalan dialects: "barceloni" (Eastern Catalan) and "lleidata" (Western Catalan). The data have been statistically treated by means of MultiDimensional Scaling (MDS), and the configurations obtained allow us to observe significant differences between open and closed vowels in both dialects.
VOWEL CHANGE IN RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION: EVIDENCE FROM THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH
Jonathan Harrington, Sallyanne Palethorpe, and Catherine Watson
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Abstract It is well established that accent changes in general originate from younger members of the community whose speech includes more innovative forms of pronunciation. However there is a paucity of studies that have examined experimentally whether a person’s vowel space changes with time in the same direction as that of the wider community. In order to examine this further, we analysed nine of the Christmas broadcasts made by Queen Elisabeth ll spanning three time periods (the 1950s; the late 1960s/early 70s; the 1980s). An analysis of the monophthongal formant space showed that the first formant frequency was generally higher for open vowels, and lower for mid—high vowels in the 1960s and 1980s data than in the 1950s data, which we interpret as an expansion of phonetic height. The second formant frequency showed a more modest compression in later, compared with earlier years.
ACOUSTIC COMPARISON OF CHILD AND ADULT FRICATIVES
Akiko Onaka and Catherine I. Watson
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Abstract The study presents acoustic comparisons between child and adult productions of the 9 English fricatives. Fricative tokens are obtained from citation—form words by 4 boys and 4 girls (aged 7 to 11) and 5 men and 5 women. The results show the overall spectral shapes of fricatives produced by the children are similar to those by the adults, however, some significant differences are found in the resonance values and resonant bandwidth. Classification experiments results show that in general the children's fricative data performed much more poorly than the adult data. The implications of the results for automatic speech recognition are discussed.
WUYI CITATION TONE ACOUSTICS: PROBLEMS FOR TONOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION
Napier Guy Ian Thompson
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Abstract This paper describes the acoustic characteristics (Fu and duration) of the citation tones of Wuyi, a Southern Wu dialect, belonging to the Wuzhou dialect sub-group. Mean acoustic data from one male speaker are presented. It is shown how the results of the analysis pose questions for tonological representation in current tonologlcal theory.