Charting vowel spaces in Edinburgh middle-class speech

Abstract

In this paper a partly novel combination of auditory transformation and vowel-extrinsic normalisation is applied to acoustic vowel data from six Edinburgh middle-class speakers. It is shown that the vowel plots thus produced correspond rather well to articulatory and impressionistic descriptions found in the literature. Furthermore, the relatively small variability found between the speakers in a number of vowel features suggests that a typical middle-class Edinburgh vowel space does exist. However, it is also shown that in acoustic terms this vowel space is organised even less symmetrically than is generally assumed.