Assignment

SLAA749 Assignment #3 1). Measuring formants
a. Make a recording of the following words:

1

beat bit bet bat

boot but bought pot

b. Measure the vowel formants (F1, F2) in these words. If the vowel has stable formants, get formant values for the middle of the vowel: go to “Formant” in the Sound Editor menu, then to “Formant Listing”. Round the values to the nearest 10 Hz. Write down formant values. c. After you have collected the values, enter them in Excel spreadsheet, e.g.:

F1 beat bit

F2

Print it out and hand in your results in class. NB. You don’t have to plot the formants on a vowel chart yet. We’ll go over this procedure together in class and learn how to do that in PRAAT. So don’t worry about that now, but please, save your sound files and your excel file on your computer because we are going to need them in class.

2). Measuring transitions
a. Record [a:ba:] and [a:ga:] and make a spectrogram of these signals - get the F1 and F2 values in the transition from vowel to consonant and from consonant to vowel. Which of the formants (in the transition) has different values in the two signals? b. Record [ba:b], [ga:g] - compare their F1 and F2 pattern with those of [a:ba:] and [a:ga:]. What is the difference, if there are any? Hand in your written answer to the above two questions in class.

3). Measuring VOT
Make two recordings of the following words spoken by native and nonnative speakers of English (one of those people can be you). ten - den cot – got pat- bat Calculate VOT (the duration of the period of time between the release of a consonant and the beginning of vocal fold vibration). What can you tell about the differences you find? Hand in your written response in class.