Date of Award
10-2019
Culminating Project Type
Thesis
Degree Name
English: Teaching English as a Second Language: M.A.
Department
English
College
College of Liberal Arts
First Advisor
Ettien Koffi
Second Advisor
James Robinson
Third Advisor
Isolde Mueller
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Keywords and Subject Headings
Acoustics, ATR, Vowel, Linguistics, Phoneme, Phonetic
Abstract
In the scholarship on the Somali language, lexical and syntactic structures have received disproportionately more attention than phonetic analyses. The goal of the present study was to empirically describe the relationship between tongue root harmony constraints and several other phonetic features of Somali vowels that affect vowel quality in the articulation of selected phonemes. To accomplish this, baseline measurements of the acoustic features of each set of [± ATR] (Advanced Tongue Root) vowel sounds were taken in spectrograms and compared across sets. The measurements made for each waveform include: fundamental frequency, formant 1, formant 2, formant 3 and vowel duration. The values were submitted to an independent samples t-tests. The tests indicate that F1 is the most reliable correlate of [ATR] followed by Duration. F2 is reliable for some vowel pairs while F3 demonstrated little significance. F0 was not a significant correlate in distinguishing between any vowel pairs.
Recommended Citation
Abdullahi, Erko, "The Acoustic Correlates of [ATR] Vowel Harmony in Somali" (2019). Culminating Projects in TESL. 26.
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/tesl_etds/26
