A Contrastive Analysis of High/Closed Vowels Produced by Native Speakers of British English and Serbian

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a contrastive analysis of high (closed) vowels of English /iː, ɪ, uː, ʊ/ and Serbian /i, u/ produced by 20 native speakers, adolescents (14 – 15 years old) from South East England (Ramsgate) and North Serbia (Ruma). Both groups of participants read the lists of words containing both long and short vowels of the two languages. The acoustic analysis (Praat, Boersma & Weeninik) involved measuring the values of the first three formants (F1, F2, F3), as well as the duration of the stressed vowels, which were then statistically analysed and the mean values were calculated for both groups of participants (SPSS 20.00). The results indicate that Serbian vowels tend to be more open than English vowels (the values of F1 are higher). However, English vowels are more centralised than Serbian vowels and the difference between the Serbian vowels /i/ and /u/ is reflected in their F2 values - /i/ is considerably more centralised than /u/, while in English both vowels are realised with similar F2 values – both tend to be centralised. With regard to the duration, the results reveal that Serbian vowels are longer than English vowels both in short and in long stressed syllables – primarily in short ones, where the difference is up to 52,19 ms.