Vowel Normalisation in Sociophonetics:: When, why, how?

    Aktivitet: Tale eller præsentationForedrag og mundtlige bidrag

    Beskrivelse

    Sociophonetic studies of vowel variation and changes in progress very commonly these days use acoustic measurements of vowel tokens as their input data. But comparisons of individual speakers' vowel spaces are not really possible unless some form of normalisation algorithm or procedure is applied to the raw Hertz formant frequency data. This is because we all have individual head sizes that produce different resonating frequencies. My colleague Dominic Watt (University of York) and I have recently been working on the methodological intricacies of vowel normalisation procedures, and have developed our own normalisation method which we are in the process of road-testing alongside other algorithms. I will talk about the background to our study, why normalisation matters, when it should be carried out on data, and how to decide what normalisation method matches best to a particular empirical study.


    Emneord: sociophonetics, normalisation methods, vowel formants, vowel space
    Periode16 sep. 2008
    BegivenhedstitelVowel Normalisation in Sociophonetics:
    BegivenhedstypeKonference
    PlaceringLanchart Centre, Copenhagen UniversityVis på kort