Re: Rhotics (was: Pharingials, /l/ vs. /r/ in Southeast Asia)

On Saturday, February 7, 2004, at 11:05  AM, Ray Brown wrote:

> On Friday, February 6, 2004, at 08:51 PM, Dirk Elzinga wrote:
>
>> It is wrong, but you're close; a lowered third formant is the cue for
>> rhotacization. A lowered second formant is the cue for backness (more
>> precisely, it's the difference between the second and first formant).
>
> I'm sure I'm not the only one on this list who is not au_fait with
> these
> terms 'lowered second formant' and 'lowered third format'. Could you
> please explain.
Okay, I'll try. Any body of air (such as that enclosed by a bottle or
the mouth) will vibrate in a way which depends on its size and shape.
This vibration produces pitches at certain frequency ranges; these
frequencies are entirely dependent on the size and shape of the
resonating chamber and not on the fundamental frequency (note that
vowel quality remains constant even when the pitch changes).

During the production of vowels, we alter the size and shape of the
mouth and the corresponding resonant frequencies; this gives vowels
their particular acoustic profiles. There are two frequency regions
which are essential to the recognition of vowels: the lower one is
called the first formant and the higher one is the second formant. For
English vowels, the first formant varies from about 250 Hz to 700 Hz;
the second formant can vary from about 2900 Hz to 2200 Hz. There are
formant bands above these two, but they become decreasingly important
to speech perception. Rhoticity is defined as a lowering of the
frequency of the third formant band.

> And does 'lowered third formant' mark out rhoticity specifically or are
> their other characteristics that actually do set parameters to this
> term
> which still seems vaguely defined to me despite one or two
> protestations
> that it is not vague.  If it's not vague, then by definition it can be
> defined.
As I understand it, rhoticity is marked only by a lowered third
formant. Since there are a number of articulatory maneuvers which will
achieve this acoustic/perceptual target, I believe that the acoustic
property of a lowered third formant is definitional for rhoticity.

For Christophe:

Peter Ladefoged has a pretty nice website:
http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/ladefoge/ . There are links to
the UCLA Phonetics Archive which contains some basic information on
acoustic phonetics. You should also look at
http://www.ic.arizona.edu/~lsp/Phonetics/Acoustics/formantvalues.html ;
this describes how to extract formant values for vowels (and sonorants)
for the speech analysis package Praat. This package is free; Google for
it and take a look.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga
Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"I believe that phonology is superior to music. It is more variable and
its pecuniary possibilities are far greater." - Erik Satie

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