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(1973) suggest plotting F1 vs. F2', where F2' is a weighted average of F2 and F3,
according to (1):
(F2 – F1)
(1) F2' = F2 + .5 (F3 – F2) ————
(F3 – F1)
The advantage of employing F2' is that it takes “into account a gradual increase in
the importance of the third formant as F2 is raised in frequency.” (Fant 1973: 52). My
goal here is exposition of the data, and so in this section, I will plot F1 vs. F2 and F1 vs.
F3 in order to present the data in the least processed form. In addition, I will plot of F1 vs.
F2' for reasons which will become apparent later in this section.
I chose ten tokens of each vowel from Speaker K for measurement by employing
the following criteria. First, I attempted to identify vowels in comparable contexts.
Ladefoged (1997) suggests choosing two sets of vowels, one following a coronal stop and
one following a labial stop. As far as possible, I chose vowels in the initial syllable of a
word following these two sets of stops. However, in some cases these were not attested in
my corpus. Second, I avoided vowels which may have been affected by the context.
These included (1) vowels adjacent to a nasal consonant (e.g. ]] ]] ]] ]] ‘Mono’), which are
subject to nasalization in Mono, (2) the first vowel in a bisyllabic CV1LV1 pattern within
a word (e.g. @H @H @H @H ‘mist’), which is subject to shortening or deletion, and (3) vowels
which are subject to the optional process of leftward vowel spreading (e.g. K(CK( K(CK( K(CK( K(CK( ~ (CK( (CK( (CK( (CK( ~
(CK( (CK( (CK( (CK( ‘water’), which calls into question the actual vowel quality being measured. The
low vowel = can optionally be raised to [ as a result of a nearby high vowel (e.g. [> 5=
~ [> 5 ‘two’). This case will be analyzed separately from cases where the vowel = is not
raised. The full set of tokens used are given in Table F.3 found in Appendix F.
Unfortunately, there is at present no precise algorithm which can unequivocally
determine the best position for measuring formant frequencies. In this study I followed
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