English Diphthongs Research Articles

RP English and Castilian Spanish Diphthongs Revisited from the Beats-and-Binding Perspective

RP English and Castilian Spanish Diphthongs Revisited from the Beats-and-Binding Perspective

Quality of back vowels before /r/ in the American Inland North

Three American English diphthongs involving onsets in the back of the vowel space were investigated by means of acoustic measurements, discriminant analysis, and perceptual experiments. These diphthongs, termed DOOR/WAR, TOY, and STAR, were observed in the speech of ten young women residing in southern Michigan. The diphthongs were elicited in a variety of /b/-, /ɡ/-, and /h/-initial words (e.g. board, Boyd, and barred). Words with similar consonantal margins but different nuclei (e.g. bode, baud, and bod) were elicited, as well. The DOOR/WAR and TOY words were compared with bode and baud (and similar words with initial /ɡ/ and /h/), while the STAR words were compared with baud and bod (and similar words with initial /ɡ/ and /h/). All three methods of investigation showed that the initial part of the DOOR/WAR and TOY diphthongs more closely resembles that of bode than baud. On the other hand, the initial part of the STAR diphthong was shown to be intermediate between that of baud and that of bod.

Use It or Lose It

My aphorisme du jour allows me to roam widely in many directions, some of which, I hope, will be timely and instructive for Queue readers. My choice of the French aphorisme is a justifiably elitist affectation, paying homage to Montaigne, Voltaire, Bertrand Meyer, and that cohue d’elegance. The Gallic gargled r (as in Brassens) and the sublime long final syllable, if you get them right, simply drip with class compared with the slovenly sequence of English diphthongs: a-for-iz-um. We tend to treat the terms aphorism and epigram as posh synonyms for maxim, motto, or even saying. They are all characterized by an attempt to condense volumes of wisdom into short, memorable phrases suitable, say, for adorning our college crests, tombstones, or car bumpers.

A Phonetic and Phonological Review of Glides, Semi-vowels and Diphthongs in English

A Phonetic and Phonological Review of Glides, Semi-vowels and Diphthongs in English

Introducing diphthongs to the vowel space

The aim of the study is to provide information on a new vowel space of Polish learners of British English, specifically about acoustic properties of diphthongs. Polish does not have diphthongs, though it has vowel plus glide sequences comparable to English rising diphthongs. Polish has neither vowel duration distinctions nor vowels which are qualitatively identical to the ones appearing in English diphthongs. Studying diphthongs offers the possibility of examining the interplay of substitutions of qualitative and quantitative features. Eight dipthongs were taken into account. The conditioning criteria were quality, duration, occurrence of glottal stops, and degree of nasalization. Twenty subjects were recorded reading 61 sentences with diphthongs embedded in real words. The paper discusses challenges in segmentation. Reported are non-native properties of formant and timing relations and systematic differences in alternations applied to: simple vowels versus diphthongs, rising versus centering diphthongs, and initial versus final phases of diphthongs. Specifically, nasal vocalization was found to depend on the presence or absence of a following fricative, but to be independent of a stressed or unstressed position. The finding is explained by resorting to Polish prosody, which is not stress timed. Suggestions for using the findings in second language instruction will also be offered.

Diphthongs in the repopulated vowel space

The study examined 8 British English diphthongs produced by Polish learners of English, testing the diphthongs’ quality, duration, nasalization, and occurrence of glottal stops before the diphthongs. There were twelve conditions in which the diphthongs were tested: word-initial, word-final, before a voiced obstruent, before a voiceless obstruent, before a nasal consonant, and before a nasal consonant followed by a fricative, and each of these conditions was tested in a stressed and unstressed position. The diphthongs were tested in real words, embedded in sentences, controlled for the stress position, rhythmic units, and length. The sentences were read by 8 female and 8 male Polish learners of English and control subjects. The aim of the phonetic analysis done with Praat, and employing the methodologies used by Flege (1995) for SLA and Peeters (1991) and Jacewicz, Fujimara, and Fox (2003) for diphthongs, is to examine the shape of the restructured vowel space (Liljencrants and Lindblom 1972; Stevens 1989). The approach taken here is termed Vowel Space Repopulation to emphasize that the vowel space of Polish speakers of English is re-structured by new categories in complex ways which are not adequately captured by traditional notions such as ‘‘transfer,’’ ‘‘interference,’’ or ‘‘interlanguage.’’

A developmental acoustic characterization of English diphthongs

Acoustic properties of diphthongs in American English in a /bV/ context were investigated as a function of the age of child speakers (5–18 years, 450 subjects). Duration and the average amount of spectral change per frame were computed as a measure of the contrast between initial and final steady states, and the center position of the spectral transition (normalized for vowel length) was estimated as a measure of timing between the two steady-state portions. Results indicate that duration and temporal variability are significantly larger for children below age 10. The spectral change per frame was larger for younger children, suggesting more spectral contrast between diphthong steady states. Interestingly, the normalized center position of the glide occurs at a position relatively closer to the final portion of diphthongs for /ay/ for younger children; an opposite tendency was observed in the case of /ow/, implying that younger children exhibit delayed or premature spectral transitions. Together these observations suggest the possibility that 5–8-year olds may not produce diphthongs as a unit but, rather, as a concatenation of two vowel targets in which one component is more prolonged than the other and abrupt transitions occur. [Work supported by SBC/TRI, NSF, and NIH.]

Dynamic and Target Theories of Vowel Classification: Evidence from Monophthongs and Diphthongs in Australian English

Recent studies on the perception of speech have suggested that vowel identification depends on dynamic cues, rather than a single ‘static’ spectral slice at the vowel midpoint. The experiments reported in this paper seek both to test the extent to which vowel recognition depends on dynamic information, and to identify the nature of the dynamic cues on which such recognition might depend. Gaussian classification techniques, as well as different kinds of neural network architectures, were used to classify some 3000 vowels in /CVd/ citation-form Australian English words, following training on roughly the same number of vowel tokens produced by different talkers. The first set of experiments shows that when vowels are classified from three spectral slices taken at the vowel margins and midpoint, only diphthongs, but not monophthongs, benefit from the additional spectral information at the vowel margins. A further experiment shows that vowels are no better classified from a time-delay neural network than from the three-slice network in which time is not explicitly represented. At least for the citation-form, Australian English vowels in this study, these results are interpreted as being more consistent with a target, rather than a dynamic, theory of vowel perception.

Spectro-temporal description of dipthongs in F1− F2− F3 space

The prevailing approach to the acoustic-phonetic description oescription of the diphthong is based (1) on the two lowest, vocal-tract resonance (or formant) frequencies ( F 1 and F 2) considered either individually or jointly in the F 1− F 2 plane, and (2) on a very sparse representation of the temporal course of these frequencies. While this time-honoured approach has been particularly useful for characterising the initial and final vowels of the diphthong, there appears to be very little progress beyond the F 2− F 2 plane, as a parametric framework for elucidating the dynamic nature of the vowel-to-vowel transition. By contrast, a more accurately spectro-temporal description of a subset of the Australian English diphthongs ( ▪) is obtained in this work by considering a detailed, temporal representation of the three lowest formant-frequencies ( F 1, F 2 and F 3). In particular, certain nonlinearity features of the densely-sampled contour of the F 3 are highlighted, which appear to have hitherto been either unknown or considered inconsequential to the specification of the diphthong. This finding is shown to contribute a new, three-dimensional ( F 1− F 2− F 3) perspective on the acoustic characteristics of the vocalic transition of the diphthong.

Three approaches to the classification of American English diphthongs

Various investigations of diphthongs suggest that they can be effectively classified in terms of (1) the pattern of fundamental frequency and formants at the onset and offset of the production, (2) the onset formant pattern and the F 2 rate of transition or (3) the onset formant pattern and the direction of formant movement in an acoustic space. These three hypotheses were assessed in (a) a log F 1 × log F 2 space and (b) an “auditory–perceptual space” in which the dimensions are based on ratios between pairs of formants and between F 1 and a reference value related to the vowel’s average formant frequency. Values for relevant parameters were obtained for a corpus of 768 tokens of six American English diphthongs produced in two contexts ([b_d], [h_d]) at two tempos (slow, fast) with differing stress (stressed, unstressed). The hypotheses were evaluated in respect to classification performance using a statistical pattern recognition procedure. All three hypotheses produced correct classification of the corpus exceeding 90%, although highest correct classification was obtained by specification of onset and offset formant patterns (an average of 96%). Slightly higher percent correct classifications were obtained for each hypothesis when parameters are specified in the auditory–perceptual space rather than in the log F 1 × log F 2 space.

Acoustic correlates of American English diphthongs.

Various studies on diphthongs suggest that they can be effectively classified in terms of either (1) the pattern of the fundamental frequency and formants at the onset and offset of the production, (2) the onset pattern and the F2 rate of transition, or (3) the onset pattern and the direction of formant movement in an acoustic space [Nearey and Assmann, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 80, 1297–1308 (1986)]. Extending earlier reports [Gottfried, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 89, 1997 (1991)] these three hypotheses were assessed in (a) a log F1×log F2 space and (b) an auditory-perceptual space. Values for the relevant parameters were obtained for a corpus of 768 productions of American English diphthongs (6 diphthongs ×4 speakers ×2 tempos ×2 stress conditions ×2 consonantal contexts). The hypotheses were then evaluated in terms of classification performance using a statistical pattern recognition procedure. Results indicate that the acoustic parameters specified in each hypothesis were effective in obtaining correct classification of diphthongs. [Work was supported by NIDCD.]

The Identification of Vowel Errors Using Traditional Articulation or Phonological Process Test Stimuli

The stimulus items from five commonly used assessment tools were examined to determine the number of occurrences of each English vowel and diphthong in a variety of contexts. Results indicated that the overall number of occurrences varied greatly from vowel to vowel and from test to test. In addition, the distribution of vowels across contexts was not balanced in any of the tests examined. The suitability of such stimuli for analyzing vowel errors is discussed in light of these results. Suggestions are provided for supplementing tests with additional stimulus words in order to obtain an adequate sample for vowel analysis. The suggested procedures are illustrated with data from one phonologically disordered client exhibiting vowel errors.

An approach to the classification of American English diphthongs

Six diphthongs of American English (/au, aɪ, eɪ, oᴜ, ɔɪ, ju/) were produced by four midwestern American speakers (two male, two female) at two tempos (slow, fast) with differing stress (stressed, unstressed) in two contexts ([b_d], [h_d]). Using a plot of the fundamental frequency and the first three formants derived from linear‐prediction‐coding (LPC) analysis, the onset and offset of each production was determined. The pattern of formants and fundamental frequency at the onset and offset of diphthongs was used to establish a set of parameters that can classify intended productions of the American English diphthongs in varying stress and tempo conditions with an average accuracy of 93%. Results are also presented for diphthong, target‐syllable, and sentence durations. The classification results are discussed with respect to hypotheses concerning the perception of diphthongs.

Vowel shift, free rides and strict cyclicity

This paper uses the example of the Modern English Vowel Shift Rule to show that the constraints available in Lexical Phonology can combat potential problems of excessive abstractness. Separate tense-vowel and lax-vowel VSRs are formulated; both are ordered on cyclic stratum 1 of a two-level Lexical Phonology. The Strict Cyclicity Condition prohibits the application of either VSR in underived environments, while in derived environments tense-vowel VSR is fed by the tensing rules, and lax-vowel VSR by the laxing rules. This analysis solves the long-standing problem of free rides through Vowel Shift, and reveals a principled division in the class of Modern English strong verbs. Further related revisions, involving the status of English diphthongs and the derivation of [jū] in assume, cube, etc., are also proposed.

Rate‐dependent variability in English and Japanese complex vowel F2 transitions

Are the effects of changes in speech rate on F2 transition slopes in languages with and without unitary diphthongs explicable in terms of general phonetic and physiological principles? Five American English diphthongs and four Japanese vowel sequences were recorded, spoken at three different tempos by eight and seven speakers, respectively. LPC spectra were computed at 10‐ms intervals, and the resulting F2 contours were analyzed by a computer program designed to objectively define and measure steady‐state and transitional portions of the vowel. Contrary to the claims of Gay [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 44, 1570–1573 (1968)], speech rate was found to significantly affect two measures of transition slope in English, with slope decreasing as speech rate increased. Individual diphthong populations in both languages displayed high correlations between a transition, slope and its F2 range, indicating that rate adjustment is not simply a matter of target undershoot at faster speeds. Japanese showed less rate‐dependent variability, suggesting that temporal reorganization for different speech rates is affected by language‐specific structures. [Work supported by NIH.]

The Monophonematic Status of Diphthongs Revisited

Abstract This paper presents a challenge to the well-established monophonematic view of German and English diphthongs. Empirical evidence is provided by speech error patterns showing that misordered diphthongs occasionally split apart during the error process. Since both splitting up and remaining intact can be observed with diphthongs, a linear analysis, which predicts an all-or-none behaviour, proves to be inadequate. An explanation for the relative cohesiveness of these phonemes can be found in a multilevel representation within which diphthongs are two discrete atoms on the segmental level which are molecularized in the suprasegmental structure.

Syllable onsets in Irish English

This study is intended to present a unified discussion of a number of phenomena which are different in Irish English (hereafter IrE) and Received Pronunciation (hereafter RP) as described in Gimson (1980:89ff.). It is also designed to show that these phenomena are in fact related to each other, not only due to their position in syllable nuclei but also on the level of phonological abstractness. The first phenomenon concerns the sequence which developed from Middle English /iu/ and /eu/. In both of these diphthongs the first element developed into a voiced palatal continuant losing its vocalic character, and yielding finally the sequence /ju:/ (Dobson 1968:705ff., Welna 1978:224). The frequency of this sound in French loan-words and the fact that Middle English /u:/ had been shifted first to /qu/ and later to /au/ as a result of the Great Vowel Shift seems to have led to /ju:/ standing as the pronunciation of the letter u and to be used as the English rendering of any later loan-words containing long /u:/. It also affected the pronunciation of the /u:/ sounds of loans established in Middle English, for example university with initial /u:/ (from Old French universite, Onions 1966:961). The dating of the collapse of /eu/ and /iu/ can be given as mid 16th century, interpreting the orthoepic evidence of Bullokar who confirms in a rhyme that they were pronounced the same (Dobson 1968:802) and the merger was complete by the mid 17th century when it probably had developed from /iu/ to /ju:/. The importance of these considerations for the issue at hand is to establish that /ju:/ was the pronunciation of the Middle English diphthongs at the time of the most extensive Anglification of Ireland in the 17th and early 18th century (Bliss 1979: 19ff.). The remarks below refer to present-day IrE and to the variety of it which I term urban middle class. This general designation, while without validity for many areas of IrE phonology such as the realization of stressed vowels, can be permitted here because the peculiarities of IrE described below are found in all varieties of IrE with the sole exception of contact IrE (that of the ‘Gaeltacht’ or Irish-speaking areas) and of course of Ulster which is radically different from the English of the Republic of Ireland. In present-day IrE long /u:/ occurs after /j/. This means that RP /(-)juq/ does not exist in IrE. The reason is that IrE has maintained /r/ post-vocalically in all varieties and in all positions (all vowels that occur before word-final /r/, when stressed, are also long):

Perceptual structure of monophthongs and diphthongs in English.

This multidimensional scaling investigation seeks to determine the dimensions underlying the perception of diphthongs in American English and whether such dimensions are radically different from those found in studies utilizing monophthongal vowels. Dissimilarity data were obtained from subjects' paired comparison judgments of 15 English vowels [i e ε æ a o u i at a ju]. INDSCAL analysis of the data revealed that the perceptual structure of the vowels was best modeled in terms of four perceptual dimensions labeled front/back, high/low, low-back onset, and mid/nonmid. Regression analyses demonstrated that the perceptual structure of the vowels was most significantly related to the first two formants of the stimulus vowels. No dimensions relating to dynamic acoustic information (such as direction and/or extent of formant change over time) were found. Separate regression analyses demonstrated that these empirically derived dimensions were significantly related to the distinctive features relating to tongue position and, in particular, that the high/low dimension was better predicted by Ladefoged's multivalued Height feature than by Chomsky and Halle's binary High, Low, and Tense.

The i-umlaut of the Old English West Saxon diphthongs (again)

The attention by ‘modern’ linguists to the problems of Old English diphthongal spellings and their phonetic realizations may perhaps be dated (without doing anyone an injury) from the study by Robert P. Stockwell and C. Barritt (1951). Since that time much ink has been spilled (or typewriter ribbons worn out) in attempts to specify in some precise and principled way the phonological structure of the entities spelled in Old English ea, eo, io, Ia and ie. I will spare the reader a review of these articles and commentaries since such a review would prove both tiresome and uninformative.

The effects of varying glide durations on diphthong identification.

Traditionally, diphthongs have been described as consisting of an initial steady-state portion, a glide, and a relatively short final steady-state portion. This study investigated the contribution of glides of variable duration, in the presence of steady-state portions of fixed duration, to diphthong identification. The three American English diphthongs /ai/, /au/ and /??/ were synthesized, employing fixed durations for the steady-state portions and varying the duration of the glide from zero (no glide) to approximately 150 msec. Two-vowel sequences, identical to the steady-state portions of the diphthongs and separated by "gaps" of varying durations, were also synthesized. Four different fundamental-frequency values were employed in the synthesis. The stimuli were presented to subjects, who were asked to identify each item as one of the three diphthongs or one of the three possible two-vowel sequences. The glide durations at which identification of the stimuli changed from diphthong to vowel sequence were different for the three vocalic sequences tested; the identification pattern was also influenced by the fundamental-frequency values.