Abstract
This paper seeks to apply an acoustic phonetic methodology to measure and account for the impressionistic assessment of the speech of three brothers whose relatives, friends, and acquaintances say “they sound exactly alike.” The current investigation is limited to the pronunciation of the 11 phonemic monophthong vowels in American English. The psychoacoustic instruments of masking and Just Noticeable Difference (JND) are used to verify if the brothers “sound alike” acoustically. The correlates of the vowels that are investigated in this study are F0, F1, F2, F3, intensity, and duration.
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Recommended Citation
Koffi, Ettien and Lyons, James
(2018)
"Sibling Acoustics: Phonetic Measurements of the Vowels Produced by Three Brothers Who "Sound Alike","
Linguistic Portfolios: Vol. 7, Article 6.
Available at:
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/stcloud_ling/vol7/iss1/6
Author Bio
Ettien Koffi, Ph.D., is a professor of Linguistics at St. Cloud State University, Minnesota, USA, specializing in acoustic phonetics (Speech Intelligibility). His research interests center around sociophonetic variations in Central Minnesota English, acoustic phonetic accounts of intelligibility in L2 English, and acoustic phonetic and general description of Anyi, a West African Language spoken in Cote d'Ivoire. He is the author of four books and numerous papers covering topics as varied as syntax, translation, language planning and policy, orthography, and indigenous literacy training manuals. He can be reached at enkoffi@stcloudstate.edu.
James Lyons is a graduate of Saint Cloud State University (SCSU) with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Linguistics and a minor in Teaching English as a Second Language. He is currently teaching and managing an English conversation school in Kumamoto, Japan. He has served as a tutor in the Intensive English Center at SCSU as well as an ESL teaching assistant in Saint Cloud schools. He has spent a year abroad studying Japanese language and culture at Seinan Gakuin University in Fukuoka, Japan. James dreams of one day teaching English and Literature at a University in Japan. He can be reached at jlyonsesl@gmail.com.