We report quantitative measurements of coarticulation of the Advanced Tongue Root (ATR) feature in neighbouring and non-neighbouring vowels. Native speakers of Southern British English produced utterances; we matched pairs that were identical except for a contrast of [+ATR] vs. [-ATR] on one "transmitter" vowel. From recordings, we computed an acoustic representation at the centres of the vowels, measuring the difference in pronunciation associated with the contrast in [ATR] value. We observed a consistent coarticulatory effect two syllables after the transmitter when it was a low vowel (i.e. the /aa/ vs. /uh/ and /o/ vs. /oo/ pairs), but little or no effect when the transmitter was a high vowel (i.e. the /i/ vs. /ii/ and /u/ vs. /uu/ pairs). Interestingly, we observed more dramatic coarticulation on the next-nearest neighbour than on the vowel following the transmitter.
Cite as: Orphanidou, C., Kochanski, G., Coleman, J. (2008) An acoustic investigation of the [ATR] feature effect on vowel-to-vowel coarticulation. Proc. ISCA ITRW on Speech Analysis and Processing for Knowledge Discovery, paper 051
@inproceedings{orphanidou08_spkd,
author={Christina Orphanidou and Greg Kochanski and John Coleman},
title={{An acoustic investigation of the [ATR] feature effect on vowel-to-vowel coarticulation}},
year=2008,
booktitle={Proc. ISCA ITRW on Speech Analysis and Processing for Knowledge Discovery},
pages={paper 051}
}