Monday, April 07, 2008

Formant Map

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Plotted data, gotta love it.

A man after my heart!

Anonymous said...

And can we get some analysis please?

Anonymous said...

Well, analysis that I can understand anyway, as the explanation below the graph leaves me in confusion.

cara said...

sigh...dipthong, that is my favourite word!

yes, analysis, tell our big greedy brains what this all means.

D. Sky Onosson said...

You'll just have to wait for my thesis to be finished...

Well, if you must know, this chart shows that the movement of the tongue in vowel of the word "wide" (as spoken in Manitoba) is not quite the same as that of the vowel in the word "white". And the difference between them might not be quite what everyone else who has studied the difference thought it was.

The vowel in "wide" is much longer than the one in "white". It has been assumed by some that in the shorter version, the tongue made the same movement (known as a "gesture" in the articulatory theory of phonology) over a shorter period of time, in effect just moving faster over the same space.

My data instead indicates that the tongue likely skips the entire first portion of the gesture entirely, picking up somewhere in the middle and continuing along roughly the same path to the end.

There is more stuff related to the r's, but that takes even more explaining, which I haven't quite gotten all figured out yet.

D. Sky Onosson said...

P.S. It's "diphthong", with two h's. I think it's the only case of "ph", "th", and "ng" all in the same word.

Lorne Roberts said...

heh. nice explanation of the wide/white dualism.

this explains partly why i have such a christly hard time teaching my students English as a second language.

cara said...

I have been reading a book about teaching children to read. I just encountered the word "diphthong" recently and fell in love. Apparently, I'm a poor lover since I can't even get the name straight.

sort of like calling out the wrong name during sex.