Abstract
This paper pursues two goals simultaneously. First, it seeks to describe the [±ATR] vowels of Anyi Morofu acoustically by investigating six correlates: F0, F1, F2, F3, intensity, and duration. Anyi has a nine-vowel system that is divided evenly among four [+ATR] and four [-ATR] vowels. The vowel /a/ is ambidextrous in that it straddles both groups. The second goal is to demonstrate that reference levels can be used reliably to determine which one(s)of the six acoustic correlates is/are the most acoustically robust. The data that serves as the basis for this analysis comes from 10 participants who produced nine carrier sentences in which a monosyllabic verb of /hV/ structure occurred. Each sentence was repeated three times. The participants produced a total of 270 vowels (10 x 9 x 3). All in all, 1,602 acoustic tokens (270 x 6) are examined in this paper.
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Recommended Citation
Koffi, Ettien
(2016)
"The Acoustic Correlates of [±ATR] Vowels: An Analysis by Reference Levels of Anyi Vowels,"
Linguistic Portfolios: Vol. 5, Article 9.
Available at:
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/stcloud_ling/vol5/iss1/9
Author Bio
Ettien Koffi is a professor of Linguistics. He teaches the linguistics courses in the TESOL/Applied Linguistics MA program in the English Department at Saint Cloud State University, MN. He has written three linguistic books: Language Society in Biblical Times (1996), Paradigm Shift in Language Planning and Policy: Game Theoretic Solutions (2012), and Applied English Syntax (2015). He is the author of many peer-reviewed articles on various topics in linguistics. His primary area of specialization is at the interface between acoustic phonetics and phonology. He has extensive experience in emergent orthographies and in the acoustic phonetic and phonological description of dialect variation. He can be reached via email at: enkoffi@stcloudstate.edu.