An examination on formant variations could enhance the understanding of the phonetic and phonological aspects of language. Linguists and phoneticians pursue the linguistic aspects of vowel quality after removing nonlinguistic physiological differences from the acoustic data. Yang (1996) estimated the ratio of the vocal tract lengths of men to those of women from the third formant of the English vowel /Λ/ reported in Peterson & Barney (1952) as 1 to 0.86, which indicates that the vocal tracts of women are 14% shorter than those of men. The formant value is inversely related to the vocal tract length ( Pickett, 1980): the vocal tracts of men are shorter than those of women. In general, the formant values of men tend to be lower than those of women, mainly due to anatomical differences. Specifically, the first formant value varies according to the degree of jaw opening while the second formant value does according to the tongue position. This research could be useful as a foundation for future studies comparing curvilinear data sets.Īcoustically, a speaker’s articulatory movements, or the filter of speech, are measured by the formant frequency ( Fant, 1973). We conclude that scaling and nonlinear testing are useful tools for pinpointing differences between speaker group’s formant trajectories. The trajectories are related acoustically to F1 and F2 and anatomically to jaw opening and tongue position. Also, women’s trajectories appear more dynamic along the vertical and horizontal axes than those of men. Generally, more group difference exists in F1 than in F2. GAMMs of all the scaled formant data produced various patterns of deviation along the measurement points. R was used to scale the first two formant data sets of men and women separately. The standard deviations of each group showed similar patterns at the first formant (F1) and the second formant (F2) axes and at the measurement points. The results indicate that women yielded proportionately higher formant values than men. A formant analysis script was prepared, and six formant values at the corresponding time points within each vowel segment were collected. Praat was used to read the sound data of Hillenbrand et al. This study examined formant trajectories of English vowels produced by ninety-three American men and women the values were normalized using the scale function in R and compared using generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs). Formant trajectories reflect the continuous variation of speakers’ articulatory movements over time.
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