San Diego accents: A preliminary investigation into the vowel spaces of young males and females

Abstract

This study investigates the vowel spaces of eight native San Diego speakers (four males and four females) that are: born and raised in San Diego County, only lived outside San Diego for a maximum of four years, English dominant speakers, Caucasian, and aged between 23 and 32 (mean = 28.6 years old). All participants were recorded using handheld Zoom H2n audio recorders. Participants read a word list of 74 monosyllabic words, 80 sentences (mean = 6.5 words per sentence), and participated in a short 20-minute sociolinguistic interview about themselves and the San Diego area. For the purposes of this study, F1–F3 were measured in Praat for all vowels in the read speech of the eight participants using dynamic formant measurements at 10% intervals across each vowel. Results are normalised across all speakers, and then analyzed in Excel and R. Although this is a preliminary study, this investigation provides some of the first acoustic-phonetic results looking at the San Diego accent in young males and females.