2007
DOI: 10.1017/s0025100306002817
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Rosa's roses: reduced vowels in American English

Abstract: Beginning phonetics students are taught that American English has two contrasting reduced vowels, transcribed as [´] and [È], illustrated by the unstressed vowels in the minimal pair Rosa's vs. roses. However little seems to be known about the precise nature or distribution of these vowels. This study explores these questions through acoustic analysis of reduced vowels in the speech of twelve American English speakers.The results show that there is a fundamental distinction between the mid central [´] vowel … Show more

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Cited by 73 publications
(52 citation statements)
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“…The ideal female values are about fifteen percent higher. However, the evidence collected over the years of phonetic research confirms that the formant values of schwa retrieved from continuous speech are very variable and sensitive to context (e.g., Lindblom, 1963;Browman and Goldstein, 1992;Flemming and Johnson, 2007). Some of these studies showed that the formant positions of schwa are influenced not only by the neighbouring consonants, but also by vowels in the neighbouring syllables.…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 93%
“…The ideal female values are about fifteen percent higher. However, the evidence collected over the years of phonetic research confirms that the formant values of schwa retrieved from continuous speech are very variable and sensitive to context (e.g., Lindblom, 1963;Browman and Goldstein, 1992;Flemming and Johnson, 2007). Some of these studies showed that the formant positions of schwa are influenced not only by the neighbouring consonants, but also by vowels in the neighbouring syllables.…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 93%
“…8.5 (2011). As a guide to identify schwas in the productions by the participants, the analysis of schwa was conducted in reference to the example acoustic data of the English schwa from previous studies: A duration ratio of schwa to a stressed vowel is 0.47 in a non-final syllable, while it is 0.63 in a final syllable (Wallace, 1994), and the quality of schwas occurring in the first or middle positions of a word has an F1 of 449 Hz and an F2 of 1922 Hz, while word-final schwas are 539 Hz for F1 and 1797 Hz for F2 (Flemming & Johnson, 2007). These F1 and F2 values of schwa vowels were obtained from female speakers.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 95%
“…The rating scale ranges from 1 (lowest familiarity) to 7 (highest). Regarding the position of schwa, previous studies have shown that the phonetic realization of schwa differs between initial and final syllables (Flemming & Johnson, 2007;Wallace, 1994). Therefore, the words were divided into two sets based on schwa position, with both low-and highfamiliarity words in each set.…”
Section: Methodsmentioning
confidence: 99%
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“…Word-final vowels in English, however, show greater duration (Oller, 1973;Klatt, 1976;Wightman et al, 1992) and less vowel reduction (Hammond, 1999;Flemming & Johnson, 2007) than non-final unstressed vowels. Hammond (1999) proposes a rule of final vowel tensing in English, to account for the fact that lax vowels, apart from [ə], cannot occur in this position.…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%