Acoustic Phonetics

Question 1

What are vowels?

Answer 1

Speech sound formed without significant constriction within vocal tract and serves as a syllable nucleus.

Question 2

What is the primary articulator of vowels?

Answer 2

tongue is primary articulator

Question 3

True or False: only one vowel sound can occur within a syllable.

Answer 3

True it is called a syllabic vowel

Question 4

Give 3 characteristics of vowels:

Answer 4

Good for oral examination—e.g., “aaaah”
4 can be sustained indefinitely
5 usually voiced

Question 5

What are the three dimensions to describe vowels in English?

Answer 5

Tongue height high–low; open–close
Tongue advancement: front–back
Tip rounding: rounded–unrounded

Question 6

What are the 2 of the 3 dimensions that are important to distinguish all vowels?

Answer 6

Tongue Height and Tongue advancement

Question 7

What is a vowel quadrilateral?

Answer 7

Four-sided figure with corner (point) vowels /i u A æ/ as vertices.
Where symbols appear in
pairs, the one to the right represents
a rounded vowel.

Question 8

What are monopthongs?

Answer 8

• A vowel with a single unchanging quality.
• represented by single symbols in IPA—e.g., /u/ who, /I/ hid, /æ/ had

Question 9

What are diphthongs?

Answer 9

• vowel-like sound with a gradual transition from one vowel (onglide) to another
  (offglide).
• e.g., how, eye, hoy
• relatively slow transition
• represented by digraph in IPA—e.g., /aI/ (eye)
• occasionally but rarely shown with a tie-bar to indicate that a diphthong is really
  one vowel—e.g., >aI.

Question 10

In vocal tract configurations: F1 is directly related to
___________—more __________ vowels have
__________________ F1

Answer 10

F1 directly related to
openness—more open vowels have
higher F1

Question 11

In vocal tract configurations: F2 inversely related to _______________— ________vowels have __________ F2

Answer 11

F2 is inversely related to backness—back vowels have lower
F2

Question 12

In vocal tract configurations: F1 and F2 related to _________________________

Answer 12

F1 and F2 related to dimensions of
articulation

Question 13

What does this diagram show?

Answer 13

• Vowels Hilenbrand et al. (1995)
• men, women, and children aged 10–12 years
• each vowel is represented by a wide range of F1–F2 values
• formant patterns overlap between vowel categories

Question 14

What is a Spectrum Analyzer?

Answer 14

a device for determining spectrum of stored waveform.
* uses Fourier analysis