Peter Sipes Phonology

Vowel length visualized Abstract

This paper looks at the variance of vowel duration within a set of spectrograms. Various factors that could affect duration are examined. These factors included lax/tense vowels, simple vowels/ diphthongs/syllabic sonorants and primary stress/non-stress. The phonemes following the vowels in question were also examined for vowel/consonant/word-finality, voice/voicelessness, nasality and sonority. Few patterns were found.

Methods
The spectrograms at the Monthly Mystery Spectrogram for January, February, May, July, September and December of 2008 are used to look at the effect of the following phonemes on vowel duration. Some of spectrograms may be difficult to locate. They are all available for viewing at http://bit.ly/SVbmnd. Inputting the data into a spreadsheet, available at http://bit.ly/R8td5N, the effects of various phonological features was examined. In addition to simple vowels, diphthongs and syllabic sonorants were examined; unless otherwise qualified (e.g. tense vowels) all groups will be referred to as vowels.

Data
The spreadsheet for the data available at http://bit.ly/R8td5N, though to edit it you will need to save it to your own version. The 44 vowels ranged in length from 20ms to 300ms. Some vowels showed minimal variation in length. Others showed quite a bit. Dividing the data set into quartiles, the boundaries are 57.5ms, 100ms and 142.5ms. The vowels highlighted in gray showed so little variance that the variance shown stayed bounded within a given quartileadmittedly a rough measure that ignored much data. A wide spread of duration says little about basic categories: simple lax (, ), simple tense (i) and diphthongs (, e) all showed wide

variance. On the other hand, nothing would seem to cause variance with the simple lax vowels // and //both below the median duration of 100ms. Chart 1: Duration spread of vowels (dark bands indicate intraquartile variance only) Vowel i e o o Duration spread 40ms110ms 75ms275ms 20ms50ms 60ms230ms 30ms180ms 100ms140ms 60ms70ms 150ms300ms 200ms225ms 140ms 125ms 120ms 115ms 100ms Quantity in sample 9 6 6 5 3 3 3 2 2 1 1 1 1 1

Items of note: Being in word final position seems to make no difference (30ms275ms). This is especially apparent with /i/ which shows variance from 75ms275ms over four data points. Save for one outlier (// at 60ms), diphthongs are all longer than the median duration of 100ms (115ms300ms) On the other hand simple lax vowels (20ms225ms) and simple tense vowels (75ms275ms) are not in and of themselves predictive of duration. A vowel being followed by a consonantignoring whether the consonant is in the rime following the vowel or the onset of the next syllablehas no discernible effect on the duration, whether the consonant is voiced, voiceless, sonorant or nasal.

Even accounting for the presence consonants in the coda, there is no predictive pattern in vowel duration. // is typical. It is at its shortest with // in coda at 40ms. // in coda gives 50ms, and /t/ in coda gives 110ms. If anything, the opposite would be expected. Primary stres and vowel duration have no readily observable correlation.

Summary
The data revealed several surprises, of which the biggest is the sheer variation in duration that we ignore on a daily basis. After all, English does not use vowel duration as a phonemic distinction. Another surprise is that primary stress and duration are not tied together. The least explicable item had to do with voiced consonants in coda position. In typical IPA transcription, when voiced consonants are in coda position, the vowel is transcribed as long (e.g. [n:d], need); the data said otherwise.

References
Sonograms Hagiwara, Rob. (2009, April 27). Monthly Mystery Spectrogram. Retrieved from: http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~robh/index.html