Phonetics Phonology Meeting VI
Practice with Praat:
Vowel and Consonant
Ika Nurhayani, Ph.D
Analyzing Vowels
• Measuring formant
• Measuring duration
• Measuring pitch/intonation
• Measuring intensity
What is a formant?
• A formant is a concentration of acoustic energy around a particular frequency in the speech wave. There are several formants, each at a different frequency, roughly one in each 1000Hz band. Each formant corresponds to a resonance in the vocal tract. We distinguish one vowel from another by the differences in these overtones.
Roach (2004:242)
First and Second Formant
• The first formant (F1) is inversely related to vowel height.
• The second formant (F2) is related to the degree of backness of a vowel.
American English Front Vowels
How to present the data of the formants
Positions of Vowels in the Vowel Chart
Roach (2004:242)
Vowel Duration
• Once the sound file is open in the Editor window, you can read the total duration easily from the duration bar, but if you want to know the duration of your selected part, you can follow the following steps (Styler, 2012:13):
• Select the portion of the file you’d like to measure with the cursor
• Read the duration of the selection (in seconds) from the duration bar along the bottom of the Editor window
• "Editor" → "Query" → "Get selection length" and read your selection in the "Info" window
Duration
Measuring Pitch/ Intonation
Measuring Intensity
Acoustic Phonetics:
Consonants in Praat
Topics
• Voicing of Stops
• Place of Articulation
• Manner of Articulation
Voicing of stops
• The voiced bar/ Voicing bar
• Voicing is represented on a wide band spectrogram by vertical striations, especially in the lowest frequencies.
• For men, this is about 100-150 Hz, for women it can be anywhere between 150-250 Hz.
Voiced Onset Time (VOT)
• VOT: voice onset time (VOT) is a feature of the production of stop consonants. It is defined as the length of time that passes between the release of a stop consonant and the onset of voicing
VOT of aba (voiced consonant)
Plosives
Manner (and place) of articulation
Plosives (oral stops) involve a total occlusion of the vocal tract (no resonances being contributed by the vocal tract). The result a period of silence in the spectrogram, known as a 'gap'.
Place of Articulation
• F2 gives us information about the place of articulation of different vowels (front/back).
• This also applies for consonants. The more the consonants makes use of the vocal tract
(bilabials make the most use) the lower is F2.
• /m/ is a bilabial nasal, hence the airstream is blocked at the lips. /n/ is an alveolar nasal, the airstream is therefore blocked earlier between the back of your teeth and the alveolar ridge.
In turn /m/ “makes more use” of the vocal tract than the /n/.
• Nasals strongly resemble vowels, except the formants are not as strong
Place of Articulation
• The more the consonants makes use of the vocal tract (bilabials make the most use, alveolars follow, then velars) the lower is F2.
Manner of Articulation: Fricatives
• The turbulent airstream of fricatives creates a chaotic mix of random frequencies, each lasting for a very brief time. The result sounds much like static noise, and on a spectrogram it looks like the kind of static noise you might see on a TV screen.
Plosives
• Voiceless plosive is complete silence. On a spectrogram, this will appear as a white blank.
Nasals and Laterals
• Nasals and [l] usually look like quite faint vowels, without a lot of amplitude in the higher frequencies.
• You can still see some things that look like formants.
Exercise: Record the following sounds with Praat and analyze the vowels [a] and the consonants [b], [p], [d], [f], [m] in the spectogram
• aba apa
• aba ada
• aba afa
• aba ama
