A Cross-Language Comparative Study of English and German Vowel Space Area in Swiss German L1 Speakers

It is conventional to examine vowel systems by their acoustic correlates, specifically formants. In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) vowel chart, vowels are placed according to their relative positions determined by the first two formant values. This two-dimensional plane makes possible the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Theory and practice in language studies 2024-04, Vol.14 (4), p.931-940
Main Author: Zheng, Ning
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic phonetics
Acoustics
Articulatory phonetics
Comparative Analysis
Comparative linguistics
Data Analysis
Dialects
English language
Evaluation
Formants
Gender
Gender differences
German language
International Phonetic Alphabet
Language
Phonetics
Regional dialects
Sentences
Speech
Swiss German
Vowels
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Summary:It is conventional to examine vowel systems by their acoustic correlates, specifically formants. In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) vowel chart, vowels are placed according to their relative positions determined by the first two formant values. This two-dimensional plane makes possible the calculation of the articulatory working space of vowels. Variations in the size and shape of the vowel space exist across gender, dialects, and languages. The present study focuses on comparing the vowel space area (VSA) in English and German produced by native Swiss German speakers, attempting to shed light on whether VSAs differ significantly with different calculation methods cross-linguistically. Given the fact that absolute formant values vary tremendously across gender, Hertz values are converted to z-scores, allowing for more direct and meaningful comparisons. While vowel normalization mitigates gender-related differences within specific languages to a large extent, there remains a significant cross-linguistic gender difference. The results reveal that for 3- and 4-vowel space there is no significant effect in language but an effect is observed in gender and vowel combination on VSA, specifically in terms of individual area and overlapping ratio. This suggests that Swiss German speakers tend to utilize the same amount of vowel space in both languages, with the only difference being the expansion of English VSA in higher F2 dimension and lower F1 dimension, as observed across all calculation methods.
ISSN:1799-2591
2053-0692
DOI:10.17507/tpls.1404.01