Unit 5: Vowels

Goals:

• Basic structural properties of vowels:
  1. Articulatory description.
  2. Acoustic description.
  3. Auditory description.
• Visualisation of structural properties of vowel production, transmission and perception.

Examine these digital oscillogrammes and identify the vowels.

Discussion points:

• Definition of the term `vowel' and related terms.
• Vowels and the sonority scale/hierarchy.
• Vowels in phonological structure: phonotactics.
• Distinctive features of vowels.
• Vowel systems.
• Dependency graphs of vowels.
• Feature geometry of vowels.
• Temporal structure of vowels: short and long vowels, diphthongs.
• Tenseness, laxness and advanced tongue root (ATR)
• Articulatory properties of vowels:
  • Vowel quadrilateral.
  • Articulator positions, sagittal section.
  • Anatomy and physiology of vowels.
• Acoustic properties of vowels:
  • Source-filter theory of vowel production.
  • Temporal properties -- vowels as time functions, oscillogrammes.
  • Vowel spectrogrammes.
  • Vowel formants, vowel formant space.
• Perceptual properties of vowels:
  • Phoneme discrimination - confusion matrices.
  • Perceptual distance.
  • Anatomy of hearing.

Search

• the library,
• the web

for

• definitions,
• table, graphics.

and construct a web page with brief information about these topics and links to further information.

For further information see Unit 1 [4].