Abstract
The positions of individual vowels in the acoustic vowel space often change over time in languages such as English. This study examines the changes in the location of four point vowels [i u ɑ æ] for three English dialects (North, Midland and Inland South) as produced by three generations of speakers (children, adults aged 35-50 and 65+ years). We determined the speaker-specific spectral centroids of the midpoints of a set of 12 monophthongs in the F1 x F2 vowel space produced by each individual speaker. These formant values were then normalized using Nearey’s formula. For both the raw and normalized F1 x F2 spaces, polar coordinates for productions of each point vowel were calculated with this centroid as the origin (producing a radius and an angle—a variation of Chung et al.’s [2012]) along with vowel space areas. Compass plots were drawn for the vowels of each speaker and angle (polar) histograms for each vowel were created for each speaker group. Analysis of the histograms and radii showed significant differences among the groups in terms of the location of /æ/ and /u/ as well as area differences. The implications these data have for sound change in progress will be discussed.
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