Abstract

In early acoustic studies, diphthongs were described as formant movement from one vowel target to another (Lehiste and Peterson 1961, Holbrook and Fairbanks 1962). Nevertheless, it is also generally acknowledged that the formants of the initial and terminal targets are not necessarily compatible with the closest corresponding monophthongs used to describe them. For instance, the initial vowel of/aɪ/can vary from/a/to/æ/; and the final vowel can be/ɪ/to/ɛ/. While the terminal vowel can be considered as a syllable coda, and its variation can be attributed to the more general coda-weakening phenomenon in American English (Gick 2002), the varying nature of the initial vowel in diphthongs remains unexplained. The current study seeks to account for the acoustic difference between the initial vowel in a diphthong and its corresponding monophthong as a function of the temporal coordination of compositional units …

Date

2013

Authors

Fang-Ying Hsieh, Louis Goldstein, Dani Byrd, Shrikanth Narayanan

Journal

Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics

Volume

19

Issue

1

Publisher

AIP Publishing