F2 slope as a Perceptual Cue for the Front–Back Contrast in Standard Southern British English

Abstract

Acoustic studies of several languages indicate that second-formant (F2) slopes in high vowels have opposing directions (independent of consonantal context): front [iː]-like vowels are produced with a rising F2 slope, whereas back [uː]-like vowels are produced with a falling F2 slope. The present study first reports acoustic measurements that confirm this pattern for the English variety of Standard Southern British English (SSBE), where /uː/ has shifted from the back to the front area of the vowel space and is now realized with higher midpoint F2 values than several decades ago. Subsequently, we test whether the direction of F2 slope also serves as a reliable cue to the /iː/-/uː/ contrast in perception. The findings show that F2 slope direction is used as a cue (additional to midpoint formant values) to distinguish /iː/ from /uː/ by both young and older Standard Southern British English listeners: an otherwise ambiguous token is identified as /iː/ if it has a rising F2 slope and as /uː/ if it has a falling F2 slope. Furthermore, our results indicate that listeners generalize their reliance on F2 slope to other contrasts, namely /ɛ/-/ɒ/ and /æ/-/ɒ/, even though F2 slope is not employed to differentiate these vowels in production. This suggests that in Standard Southern British English, a rising F2 seems to be perceptually associated with an abstract feature such as [+front], whereas a falling F2 with an abstract feature such as [-front].

Speaker Gender and Salience in Sociolinguistic Speech Perception:goose-fronting in Standard Southern British English

“…In either case, F1 is less important for this study than F2 since it is vowel fronting that is of interest, which is conceived acoustically through the latter. F2 slope, which may act as a perceptual cue distinguishing fleece and goose (Chládková, Hamann, Williams & Hellmuth 2017), was consistently flat (i.e., monophthongal) for all steps along the continuum. In Table 1 and in the remainder of the article, a higher continuum step represents a more goose -like realization.…”

“…In terms of their acoustic properties, fronted tokens of goose often have very high second formants (F2) that may even overlap with those of the high front vowel fleece /i:/ (Harrington, Kleber & Reubold 2008). What distinguishes fronted goose from fleece in articulation and acoustics is a matter of debate, as scholars have investigated various factors including the roles played by tongue position, lip rounding, and F2 slope (Chládková & Hamann 2011; Harrington, Kleber & Reubold 2011; Chládková, Hamann, Williams & Hellmuth 2017). In some varieties of British English, diphthongal variants of goose have been identified, though this appears to be more common in northern accents compared to southern ones (Ferragne & Pellegrino 2010; Williams & Escudero 2014).…”

The effect of tonsillectomy on formant sound frequency

“…The third formant (F3), the fourth formant (F4) and so on, affect the sound (timbre) color. 8 Based on the above reasoning it is necessary to do speech characteristic analysis before and after tonsillectomy with or without adenoidectomy objectively so that it can be used as a basis to explain about the change of speech characteristics based on the parameters of sound analysis after tonsillectomy. This study determined the effect of tonsillectomy to the vocal tract using sound analysis parameters that include the formant frequency (F1, F2 and F3).…”

A Contrastive Analysis of High/Closed Vowels Produced by Native Speakers of British English and Serbian

“…Kontrastivna istraživanja na planu fonetike/fonologije zastupljena su najviše iz perspektive uticaja maternjeg jezika (L1) na usvajanje fonetskog sistema stranog jezika (L2) -pri čemu se najveći broj radova odnosi na engleski kao najrasprostranjeniji jezik 3 . Mnogi autori bavili su se ovom temom, opisujući, pritom, fonetski sistem maternjeg jezika, među kojima nailazimo na španski (Bradlow 1995), japanski (Tsukada 1999), slovački (Gregova 2008), francuski (Markey 1998) itd.…”