Abstract

This study investigates the developmental acoustic properties of five American English diphthongs as a function of age and gender. Diphthongs are commonly characterized by formant movements from one vowel sound (ie, onset) to another (ie, offset)(Lehiste and Peterson, 1961; Holbrook and Fairbanks, 1962). The movement of the second formant (F2) seems most prominent, and the rate of F2 transition is shown to be different from diphthong to diphthong (Gay, 1968), being a useful parameter to discriminate diphthongs (Gottfried et al., 1993). Regarding the nature of the onset and offset portions of diphthongs, the study of Holbrook and Fairbanks (1962) suggests that they hardly matches with the monophthongs that are typically used to transcribe the diphthongs. For instance, as mentioned in Gay (1968), the onset of/ai/(“bite”) can vary from/aa/to/ae/and the offset from/eh/to/iy/. There seem more disagreements on …

Date

2013

Authors

Sungbok Lee, Alexandros Potamianos, Shrikanth Narayanan

Journal

Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics

Volume

19

Issue

1

Publisher

AIP Publishing