Acoustic correlates of TENSE‐LAX vowels and ATR vowels

Abstract

Germanic vowel systems typically include two sets of vowels, a long, tense set and a short, lax set. Formant charts of English, German, Dutch, and Swedish show that lax high and mid vowels tend to have a more centralized position than their tense counterparts. Tense and lax low vowels do not show any such systematic relationships in the different languages. In African languages with vowel harmony, the harmonizing sets are sometimes labeled tense‐lax, although a more appropriate label is advanced‐retracted tongue root (ATR). Formant charts of Akan, Dho‐Luo, and Agwagwune (a Nigerian language) were compared to the Germanic ones. The tense‐lax and + / − ATR features behave very similarly for front vowels. Back − ATR vowels, however, tend to have a lower F2 than their + ATR counterparts, making them more peripheral, not more centre] like back lax vowels. Thus tense and ATR are not the same acoustically. Although these two features do not occur contrastively in any language, they do possibly both occur in rules within a language. Agwagwune has centralized allophones in closed syllables. These are not centralized like the lax vowels in Germanic languages, but could still be described with a feature lax.