Homework on Ladefoged (2005) Chapter 5 ("Charting Vowels")

The questions in this homework are in conjunction with the assignment to read Chapter 5 of Ladefoged (2005) on "Charting Vowels".

Your answers are due in class on Monday, October 22, for discussion in class that day.

Do the assigned reading described in the first section of this document and then type your answers on a single sheet of paper to bring to class with you to turn in. You may want to make a second copy of this sheet of paper, to take notes as we go over the answers.

1. Vowel features. Chapter 5 is about the relationship between the first two formant frequencies discussed in Chapter 4 and some more abstract "features" that linguists have used to classify vowel qualities when they talk about vowel contrasts (as in the UPSID descriptors that we looked at for the data analysis exercise that goes with Chapter 3). What are these "features" and how do they correspond to the acoustic properties? Which figure shows the correspondences?
2. Vowel charts. What are the acoustic properties that define the two dimensions of the vowel charts that Peter Ladefoged shows in this chapter? What are the units along the two axes of the charts?
3. American accents. Choose one of the differences between American dialects that Peter Ladefoged describes and say what this difference means in terms of the relationship among data points on some relevant pair of vowel charts in the figures in in this chapter.
4. A third dimension. Ladefoged discusses an exceptional vowel of American English that does not fit nicely into the two-dimensional vowel charts that he shows in this Chapter. Which vowel is it and why does it not fit?
5. Differences among speakers. Ladefoged talks about differences between vowels produced by men and vowels produced by women. What is the general pattern of differences that he describes? And what will the specific difference(s) be for the English vowels i and a produced by men versus women speakers? What pairs of figures in Chapter 5 show this?
6. Differences among speakers, cont. Why do these differences exist between men's vowels and women's vowels?
   Following up: Ladefoged does not talk about differences between boys and girls. Given your answer to this question and what you know about physiological differences between men and boys, do you think there will be the same pattern of differences between boys and girls that you see in the figures for men versus women?

The reading that is assigned for this homework is from the book:

Peter Ladefoged (2005). Vowels and Consonants: An Introduction to the Sounds of Languages. 2nd Ed. Blackwell.