Lab assignment 4 on "Measuring formants in English vowels"

Ling 600.01 Phonetic Theory

We will do this lab in the first class meeting of Week 5. So prepare the first part of your report for that day. The final report on this lab should be submitted as an appendix to the take-home lab exercise on using Johnson et al.'s (1993) "Method of Adjustment" paradigm to assess you and your language consultant's perceptual vowel space.

Record yourself and also record your language consultant as you produce one token each of the English words in the list below. (If you are acting as the lanuage consultant for your group, get the recordings from one of the other members of your group to treat as your FPL consultant for the purpose of this lab.)

1. had
2. hod (This is a wooden trough that rests on the shoulder which brick-layers use for carrying bricks up a scaffolding. It has the same vowel as in cot and should rhyme with sod.)
3. hawed (This is the past tense of haw, as in He hemmed and hawed. and it should rhyme with sawed.)
4. head
5. heard
6. hayed (This is the past tense of hay -- i.e., to make grass into hay. It should rhyme with made.)
7. hid
8. heed
9. hoed (This is the past tense of hoe and should rhyme with mode.)
10. hood
11. HUD (This is the acronym for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and it rhymes with bud.)
12. who'd (This is the contracted form of who would and it rhymes with sued.)

Make a vowel chart based on your own productions, and then listen to your language consultant's productions to see how they fit into your vowel space for English. Make note of any differences that you hear between your pronunciations and the consultant's. If there are differences, try to frame a set of questions about how the formant patterns should differ. Also, if you had any trouble figuring out where to put your consultant's (or your) vowels in your vowel chart, frame questions about the formant patterns that you think might help you figure out how to place those vowels. Try to limit your questions to the two or three most urgent ones (where urgency is defined by any problems you are having in transcribing the vowel contrasts in the field project language, which is the topic of the next in-class lab.)