Welcome to the world of acoustic phonetics. After having read some material about the theme, today I’m going to describe the results of a specific phonetics exercise that we were asked to do. This exercise consists on measuring F1 and F2 values for eight American English vowels after recording them in Praat.
Before talking about the results, I’ll try to summarize in a few words for those of you who are not accustomed with phonetics terminology what F1 and F2 are, based on the reading material. F1 stands for First Formant and F2 stands for Second Formant. Formants are characteristic pitches inherent to vowels that make them distinguishable to each other (there’s actually more than only two formants, but F1 and F2 are the ones phoneticians most commonly look at). In other words, by measuring this first there is how to analyze differences in wowels’ pronunciation, that is, accent-related differences.
In the following chart, the words I had to record, their representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and the values for the formants I found for my recordings through Praat are displayed (click on the image if it is too small):
First, I have to say that I found it somewhat complicated to measure Formant values in Praat. The software has a feature that gets F1 and F2 values automatically, but the problem is that the value changes significantly depending on where you click in the wavesound picture. Maybe it’s just me who don’t know exactly where to look for the values, but I’m not sure if my measures are entirely reliable. When I plugged in the values on the graph we were given, the points are not in remarkably different positions than the ones presented in the example graph on page 198.
The most interesting conclusion, for me, is that the points for “heed” and “hid” are very close. I think the reason is that I don’t see a significant difference in the pronunciation of these two words, maybe because the vowel “ɪ” is not common in Portuguese, as opposed to “i" (by the way, the letter “i" in Portuguese in pronounced like /i/).
Best,
Nikolas
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