INTERSPEECH 2013 14thAnnual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Lyon, France August 25-29, 2013

Functional Data Analysis of Tongue Articulation in Palatal Vowels: Gothenburg and Malmöhus Swedish /iː, yː, ̟ʉː/

Susanne Schötz, Johan Frid, Lars Gustafsson, Anders Löfqvist

Lunds Universitet, Sweden

This study used Functional Data Analysis (FDA) to analyse tongue articulation dynamics, more specifically the height and frontness of the tongue body and tip in the palatal vowels /i:, y:, 0ff :/ of two varieties of Swedish. Articulatory data were collected from nine speakers each of Gothenburg and Malmohus Swedish. Standard z-score transformations were used for speaker normalisation. Results showed that the tongue articulation for /i:/ and /y:/ is generally similar, and significantly different from /0ff :/ in both Malmohus and Gothenburg Swedish. We also found a subdivision of Gothenburg Swedish into two subtypes, where type 1 resembled Malmohus Swedish more. Significant differences in tongue body height were found between all varieties for all of the vowels, except for /y:/ between Gothenburg type 1 and Malmohus Swedish.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Schötz, Susanne / Frid, Johan / Gustafsson, Lars / Löfqvist, Anders (2013): "Functional data analysis of tongue articulation in palatal vowels: gothenburg and malmöhus Swedish /iː, yː, ̟ʉː/", In INTERSPEECH-2013, 1326-1330.