[From: Bruce Nevin (Wed 931020 16:37:45 EDT)]
Bill Powers (931016.0815 MDT) --
Yes. You've got it. I think you've got it. I need to read this long
post again and think about it but I do believe you've got it.
You asked for a table of formant frequencies. That doesn't appear in the
article, unfortunately. I can estimate from the figures. The vowels are
for So. Calif. pronunciations of the following words: heed, hid, aid,
head, had, HUD (the federal agency), odd, awed, owed, hood, who'd. This
is very close to the list used by Peterson & Barney in 1952 and by
subsequent researchers. It differs in substituting words with initial
glottal stop for words with initial h, the affect of the two consonants
on formants being quite similar. Guesstimating from the figures:
2a 2b 3a 3b
F1 F2 F1 F2 F1 F2 F1 F2
i 315 2400 285 2600 305 2500 260 2700
I 425 2100 400 2200 410 1990 420 2050
eI 450 2190 490 2385 405 2120 510 2515
E 570 1860 565 2100 590 1810 570 2170
ae 730 1690 785 1905 735 1780 765 1760
a 710 1200 750 1020 800 1100 810 1100
O " " " " 695 985 705 1000
^ 612 1480 620 1260 665 1395 570 1210
oU 490 1195 480 890 480 1100 500 820
U 447 1390 415 1160 435 1197 420 1105
u 350 1300 300 970 315 1105 292 885
The a columns are as spoken, reading the words; the b columns are as
matched from the palatte of synthesized sounds. The 2 columns are
averages for the 10 speakers in the experiment; the 3 columns are for the
single speaker (included in the averages, born in NY but long in So. Cal.,
and older than the others) whose dialect did not merge the a of odd and
the O of awed, which the experimenters anticipated might be different.
(It happens that these two words are both O in my dialect, as contrasted
with the a of do-re-mi-fa-sol, father, pa'd go if he could. Likewise,
cot and caught are the same vowel for me, contrasting with the a of cart.)
This gives you some idea of variation within a speaker and between
speakers. I'll see if I can get in touch with the authors and get some
better data out of them.
Got to run to catch the train.
Bruce
bn@bbn.com