Hi, everybody, should we talk more about vowels? I vote yes.
Bearing commented on yesterday's post to say that she produces an "ee" as the second vowel in the toy/boy/soy diphthong. Here's a weird thing about vowels, though: sometimes what you judge perceptually is different from what is measured acoustically. Let me show you what I mean. Here's a recording of me saying "see sit soy boy toy saw-ee," so you can hear that I'm speaking garden-variety Midwestern American English. Here's an annotated acoustical analysis of that recording:
If you are new to spectrograms, the speedy explanation is that they represent the patterns of acoustic energy in speech. For instance, if I were a standard-sized male saying "ee," I'd produce characteristic bands of energy at about 2300Hz and 600Hz every single time I produced the "ee" sound. My own "ee" is pitched a little higher, because I have a smaller frame and thus a smaller larynx than an average-sized man, and so my vocal folds vibrate more rapidly. Vowels sound distinct to us because they have distinct formant relationships: your brain parses the distribution of acoustic energy in a speaker's speech stream and translates it into sounds and words and thoughts. (Here, I will pause for a moment so you can flip the circuit breaker on your blown mind. It's amazing, isn't it??)
If you look at the horizontal red line in the image above, you'll see that it marks out a band of energy that's absent in "ee" and present in "ih." If you look at the ends of soy, boy, and toy, you'll see that there's energy there in all three of those words, in the spot where the "y" is representing the "ih" sound that finishes off the "oy" diphthong. But it's not there in the last word, where I very carefully conjoined an "aw" and an "ee."
The four arrows are aimed at those four diagonal lines. They are a visual representation of my tongue moving from a low back position ("aw") to a high front position ("ih"). If you look carefully at the fourth line, you'll notice that its angle with the vertical is more acute. To get all the way to "ee" position, at the top of its range, my tongue followed a steeper trajectory. The software lets me see the difference in movement patterns after the fact. Does that sentence cause anybody else to geek right out? Just me? Okay, then.
I used a software package called Praat to make this spectrogram -- it's free to download and reasonably straightforward to use. If you want to make some spectrograms of your own (I'm mostly looking at you, Bearing, but I'm an equal-opportunity spectrogram viewer), I'd love to see them. If there's anything I can clarify about this post, I'd be delighted to do so. This is much more fun than talking about Archduke Ferdinand or the electors.
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