A Comparative Acoustic Study Of Hanoi Vietnamese And General American English Monophthongs.pdf

i Vietnam national university, Hanoi University of languages and international studies Faculty of Post graduate studies DOÃN MINH MÃO A comparative acoustic study of Hanoi Vietnamese and general Ameri[.]

Vietnam national university, Hanoi University of languages and international studies Faculty of Post graduate studies DOÃN MINH MÃO A comparative acoustic study of Hanoi Vietnamese and general American English monophthongs Phân tích âm học so sánh hệ thống nguyên âm đơn Tiếng Việt Hà Nội tiếng Anh Mỹ Phổ th«ng A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Post Graduate Studies, University of Languages and International Studies, VNU, Hanoi in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English Linguistics Code: 60.22.15 HA NOI – 2012 i Vietnam national university, Hanoi University of languages and international studies Faculty of Post graduate studies DOÃN MINH MÃO A comparative acoustic study of Hanoi Vietnamese and general American English monophthongs Phân tích âm học so sánh hệ thống nguyên âm đơn Tiếng Việt Hà Nội tiếng Anh Mü Phỉ th«ng A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Post Graduate Studies, University of Languages and International Studies, VNU, Hanoi in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English Linguistics Code: 60.22.15 Supervisor: Pham Xuan Tho, M.A HA NOI – 2012 ii LIST OF TABLES Table Title The first and second formant frequencies of all the subjects for Page 34 each vowel The values of the first and the second token of each sound 47 produced by each speaker The average values of F1 and F2 for each vowel as spoken by 53 ten speakers vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure Title Page The spectrogram of the author’s pronunciation of [i] in hi 18 The effect of [ɲ] on [i] in inh and nhi, as produced by the researcher The effect of [ɲ]on [a] in nha 34 The difference between the vowel in e and anh, produced by a subject The difference between the vowel in e and anh, produced by another subject The similarities between the vowel in anh and ay, produced by a subject The similarities between the vowel in anh and ay, produced by another subject Spectrograms of [ɤ]and [ɤ̆n ] Spectrograms of [ɤn], on the left, and [ɤ̆ n], on the right The similarities between the vowel in a [a] and ay [ăi], produced by a subject The spectrogram of [a] is on the left, and of [ăi] is on the right The duration of [a] and [ă] in ai, on the left, and ay, on the right The correlation between the two measurements of each F1 and F2 by the first subjects The monophthongs of ten speakers of Vietnamese in Hanoi dialect The formant chart showing the average values of F1 and F2 for each monophthong as spoken by ten speakers A formant chart showing the formant frequency F1 and F2 for eight English monophthongs The scales are marked in Hz, arranged at Bark scale intervals The formant chart of Vietnamese monophthongs produced by female speakers 38 The formant chart of General American English monophthongs produced by female speakers 58 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 36 38 39 39 41 42 44 45 50 53 54 56 57 vii TABLE OF CONTENTS STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP i ABSTRACT iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENT v LIST OF TABLES vi LIST OF FIGURES vii TABLE OF CONTENTS viii Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION 1 Rationales Scope of the research and the research questions Chapter 2: THE REVIEW OF LITERATURE 2.1 The articulatory description of Hanoi Vietnamese monophthongs 2.2 The acoustic description attempts 10 2.3 Characterizing vowel qualities with the acoustic properties 16 2.4 General American English 24 2.4.1 The traditional description 24 2.4.2 The acoustics of GA 27 Chapter RESEARCH METHODOLOGY .30 3.1 The subjects 30 3.2 The stimuli 30 3.3 The recording process 31 3.4 The analysis process 32 Chapter 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 34 4.1 The acoustics of Hanoi Vietnamese monophthongs 34 4.1.1 [ɛ̆] and [ɛ] 35 4.1.2 [ɤ] and [ɤ̆] 40 4.1.3 [a] and [ă] 43 viii 4.1.4 Regression analysis 48 4.1.5 Charting the formants of Hanoi Vietnamese monophthongs 51 4.2 The monophthongs of Hanoi Vietnamese and General American English in comparison 58 Chapter CONCLUSION 62 5.1 The main findings on the acoustics of Hanoi Vietnamese monophthongs 62 5.2 The monophthongs of Hanoi Vietnamese and General American English in comparison 63 5.3 The limitations of the study and suggestions for further research 64 REFERENCES .66 Appendix 1: Phiếu chấp thuận tham gia vào nghiên cứu 68 Appendix 2: The stimuli 69 ix Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION Rationales The ultimate aim of this research is to achieve a cross language comparison between the acoustic properties of Hanoi Vietnamese monophthongs and General American English monophthongs The findings of the accomplished study are significant, from both the linguistic and pedagogical perspectives Ladefoged states firmly that, “The best way of describing vowels is not in terms of the articulations involved, but in terms of their acoustic properties.” (2003, p.104) A considerable amount of space of this thesis is devoted to the researcher’s analysis of the monophthongs, or pure vowels (Wells, 1962, p.1) of Vietnamese, Hanoi dialect Aside from a few studies conducted overseas, which have important limitations to be addressed, which are discussed in details in the Review of Literature of this thesis, there has been no attempt to study the vowel acoustics of the recognized standard Vietnamese so far The literature on Vietnamese vowel acoustics has been mainly concerned with the description of the sounds from the views of articulatory phonetics The investigations conducted by Nguyễn (1998), and Đoàn (2000) are typical examples These studies examined the behaviors of the vocal organs involved in the articulatory process when a particular sound is being produced This method, while having the advantage of being straightforward, has put forwards ideas which remain an approximation to the truth Ladefoged and Johnson (2011, p.197) comment, Traditional articulatory descriptions are often not in accord with the actual articulatory facts For well a hundred years, phoneticians have been describing vowels in terms such as high versus low and front versus back To some extent, they have been using these terms as labels to specify acoustic dimensions rather than as descriptions of actual tongue positions Phoneticians are thinking in terms of acoustic fact, and using physiological fantasy to express the idea Acoustics offers sufficient tools for explaining the vowel qualities The production of a speech sound involves firstly the vibration of the vocal cords, which produces sound waves It involves secondly the performance of the vocal tract, which can be changed into various shapes, as a filter, under the acoustic impedance Vowel sounds are characterized acoustically by formants, which are frequency regions of high energy concentration corresponding to the pass bands of the throat and mouth cavities (Wells, 1962, p.1).Therefore, instead of only studying a particular sound from the outside, rather subjectively, by observing with eyes, trying to set up a collection of its articulatory features, there should be a rigorous description method where every dimension of a sound as its nature is measured and displayed objectively on the screen of an electronic device The analysis, carrying out appropriately, would result in an acoustic vowel chart, representing accurately the linguistic aspects of Hanoi Vietnamese monophthongs, which serves as a valuable source of reference for cross language comparison The pronunciation of General American English and of Hanoi Vietnamese are acknowledged as the reference accents of English and Vietnamese respectively As a result, from the pedagogical aspect, the findings of the research are of highly practical values in teaching the pronunciation of one language to learners of the other language Scope of the research and the research questions The study first examined the quality of the pure vowels in Hanoi Vietnamese The frequencies of each of the first two formants of each monophthong (F1, F2) were investigated on the acoustic spectrographs, generated from the speech analyzer program PRAAT The results obtained from the analysis were then compared with the results of a recent research in the monophthongs of General American English, conducted by Clark, M J, Hillenbrand, J, et al (1995) The research is aimed at answering two questions: 1) What are the acoustic properties characterizing Hanoi Vietnamese monophthongs? 2) What are the common and distinctive features between the relative positions of the monophthongs in Vietnamese and General American English on the formant charts? pairs of vowels having been described with inconsistency in articulatory phonetics Articulatory phonetics describes how a vowel is articulated, in terms of the behaviors of the articulators, but there has not been a term to describe the difference between the quality or timber of one vowel and another vowel Among the dimensions of the complex sound waves produced by the human vocal cords, we need to consider carefully the spectral distribution of the component frequency A speaker can pronounce a vowel on any pitch within the range of his voice without changing its identity Ladefoged (2003) provides a prime example: I can say the vowels in heed, hid, head, had on a low pitch, when the vocal folds are vibrating about 80 times a second, and then I can say them again with vocal folds vibrating 160 times a second The pitch of my voice will have changed, but the vowels will still have the same quality I can also say any vowel loudly or softly The quality, the factor that distinguishes one vowel from another, remains the same when I shout or talk quietly (p.31) The differences among vowels are often compared with the different instruments The same note can be played on a guitar, a violin, or a piano This can be done as the sound is produced at the same rate of repetition of a special component wave, i.e, the fundamental frequency What is interesting here is that, the quality of the music produced by one instrument will be different from that of any other This is due to the differences in the amplitude as well as the frequency of the component waves The quality of a vowel differs 17 from that of another in plainly the same way Irrespective of the pitch on which a vowel is produced, the quality will stay unchanged A popular way that phoneticians describe the acoustics of the human speech sounds is using the tube models The current research is primarily concerned with the monophthongs (of Vietnamese), so the models can be conveniently summarized as follows The air in a bottle will be set vibrating when the body of air at the top of it is blown across Naturally, the note that is produced as a result of blowing the air at the bottle top will depend on the size and the shape of the bottle The more the volume of air inside is increased, the lower will the produced note be This is due to the fact that the smaller body of air will vibrate more quickly than that of a larger one, having a higher frequency of resonance When a vowel is being produced, it is the vocal tract that acts like a bottle, with the size and the shape being constantly altered If for a bottle, the air inside is set in vibration when blowing across the air at the top, for the vocal tract it is the pulses of the air from the vocal folds What makes the tract different from the bottle is its very complex shape, which can be constantly changed due to the movements of the related organs Conveniently, phoneticians often consider the body of air in the throat to be the first tube, and that in the mouth to be the second one The resonances of the vocal tract are called the formants, which correspond to the basic frequencies of the vibrations of the air in the vocal tract Therefore, the formants of a 18 sound are the properties that directly depend on the size and the shape of the tract, both the front and the back part of the cavity They are largely responsible for the characteristic quality of the vowel My vowel [i] in the Vietnamese word hi is characterized by formants around 380, 2200, and 3200 Hz Figure 1: The spectrogram of the author’s pronunciation of [i] in hi When my vowel [i] is produced, a damped wave is generated, and always with these approximate basic frequencies It is this set of components that allow us to distinguish [i] from the other vowels Each vowel is associated with a different shape of the vocal tract, resulting in the different component basic frequencies (the formants) being produced when the body of air inside vibrates 19 The traditional articulatory descriptions of vowels show a close relationship with the frequencies of the formants of the vowels As the acoustic studies of vowels have demonstrated, the frequency of the first formant (F1) is responsible for the vowel quality of being high or low, and that of the second formant effects the degree of frontness or backness, as described in articulatory phonetics This can be more clearly illustrated with a formant chart of English vowels taken from Johnson (2011), as follows A formant chart showing the frequency of the first formant on the ordinate plotted against the second formant on the abscissa, by Johnson (2011, p.197) 20 As it can be seen from the chart, in comparison with the first formant frequency of [i], the first formant of the vowel [a] increases noticeably It is also apparent that, in these vowels, as the height of the vowels decreases, their F1 increase As for the second formant frequencies, it is markedly higher for the front vowels than in the back vowels Briefly, in relation to the descriptions in articulatory phonetics, the degree of frontness or backness varies proportionally with the frequency of the second formant (F2), and the height of the vowels varies inversely with the first formant frequency (F1) In the previous reviews of the two studies on the vowels of Vietnamese, I have questioned the conclusion of the authors, because of the scale on which the research was conducted, ranging from one to four native speakers as the subjects It is now that this can be further justified As Ladefoged (2001) has pointed out, we can describe the vowel qualities of a particular vowel, produced by a particular speaker by calculating the value of the first and the second formant However, due to the anatomical differences among speakers, the precise formant frequencies that the vocal folds’ vibrations generate might be comparatively different For instance, a speaker with a bigger head will have a larger resonating cavity, which results in his comparatively lower formants, both the F1, and F2 In contrast, a vowel produced by a speaker with a smaller vocal tract will have formants with relatively lower formant frequencies Ladefoged (2001), concludes that, “In order to represent the vowels of a language, we need to show the average values of the formants” 21 and “the most useful representation of the vowels of a language is a plot showing the average values of formant one and formant two for each vowel as spoken by a group of speakers.” (p.39) In order to arrange the Vienamese monophthongs investigated in this study later so as to reflect both the acoustic dimentions as well as the tongue position as articulatory phoneticians wish, it is essential to take a closer look at a plotting approach, which has been widely employed in recent studies The answer to this plotting question is in the arrangement of the frequency scales Let us take the descriptions of the two vowels /i:/ and /u:/ in consideration, from the articulatory phonetics’ perspectives When producing /i:/, as in the English word heed, the speaker’s tongue is pulled up and forward from the rest position so that it is front and high in the mouth When producing /u:/, as in Who’d, however, the position of the tongue is still high, roughly as high as that of /i:/, but now it is pulled backward These facts have a close relation to the formant frequency While the tongue position for /i:/ is high, the frequency of the first formant, F1, is low It is a front vowel, and its second formant frequency is high For that of /u:/, the tongue position is still high Correspondingly, the first formant, F1, is high However, what makes it different from /i:/ is the second formant As a back vowel, the second formant of /u:/, F2, is noticeably higher than that of /i:/ As a result, the values of the first formants of vowels indicate the tongue’s behaviors 22 Consequently, in order to plot the vowels on a chart to indicate the formant frequencies as well as the approximation of the tongue position, the scale of F1 must represent the decreasing values For the second formant, as the traditional phonetic diagram shows the front vowels on the left, and the back vowels on the right, the scale indicating F2 values must go from right to left, in order to represent the quality of being front or back Below is a diagram, with the scales arranged as discussed aforementioned A combined acoustic and articulatory representation of some of the vowels of American English., Johnson & Ladefoged (2011, p.218) 23 2.4 General American English 2.4.1 The traditional description One of the ultimate goals of the current study is to compare the distribution on the formant chart between Hanoi Vietnamese monophthongs and General American English monophthongs; this section is devoted for an examination of the concept of General American English (GA) and its monophthongs in literature Generally, phoneticians are united surrounding the definition The pronunciation of American English is traditionally divided into the Eastern pronunciation, which includes New York City and New England, Southern, which stretches from Virginia to Texas and the southwards, and General, which includes all the remaining General American, GA, is comparable with RP in Britain A speaker of GA is a person whose accent does not tell which region of the country he comes from Put it another way, GA is described as having no characteristics of a specific region in the United States Just as RP, sometimes referred to as Queen’s English, or BBC English, GA is often referred to as Network English “It is the standard model for the pronunciation of English as an L2 in parts of Asia, and parts of Latin America.” (Gimson, 2008, p.84) According to Wells (1982), there are two major systemic differences between British RP and GA Firstly, in RP, there are three diphthongs /iə/, /eə/, /ʊə/ which cannot be found in GA Instead, in 24 GA, there are sequences of short vowel plus /r/, such as in heard, fare /bɪrd/, /fer/ Secondly, there is no /ɒ/ in GA In RP hot is pronounced as /hɒt/, but in GA, it will become /hɑ:t/ This is true with virtually all the other cases of /ɒ/ in RP, such as in bottle, cot, pot, spot However, Gimson (2008) also points out that a limited subset of GA has /ɔ:/, for example, across, gone, often, cough, orange, porridge In terms of the lexical occurrence, the differences are in words of RP having /ɑ:/, while in GA, they become /æ/ Gimson (2008) also stresses that this commonly happens in the context before a voiceless fricative, or before a nasal followed by another consonant For example, RP past [pɑ:st] is GA [pæst] Bellow is the further examples of the comparison between RP and GA vowels, provided by Gomez (2012, p.12) 25 Change of vowel / ɒ/ to /ɑ:/ and /ɔ:/, Regarding the diphthongs, which is not the primary concern of the current study, the differences between the two systems are varied The most noticeable change is the shift from / əʊ/ in RP to that of /oʊ/ in GA, such as in home, [həʊm] of RP, and [hoʊm] GA As Gomez (2012) has pointed out, the shift is concerned with the change of the mid central unrounded vowel /ə/ to the close-mid back rounded 26 vowel /o/ in the first vowel of the diphthong This shift, according to the author, is considered to be systematic He offers several examples of this change in the table below (p.14) 2.4.2 The acoustics of GA Hillenbrand et al (1995) conducted a study of the acoustic properties of GA The vowels /ɪ, i, e, ɜ, æ, a, ɔ, o, ʊ, u, ʌ, ɝ/ in /h-v-d/ syllables, produced by 45 men, 48 women, and 46 children were recorded The majority of the participants, (87%), were born and raised in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, the southeastern and southwestern parts of the state of Michigan The remaining were from other parts of upper Midwest, including Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, northern Ohio, and northern Indiana In order to increase the homogeneity of the sample, ensuring that they all speak GA, a procedure of selecting the subjects from the larger group, described by the researchers as being “an extensive screening procedure” was conducted The key 27 part of the procedure was a careful assessment of dialect It focused on the subjects’ production of /a/ - /ɔ/ distinction The formants of F1-F4 were measured from the LPC spectra Below are the average F1-F2 formant charts of pure vowels as produced by American men and women The average formant frequencies of the pure vowels produced by American men (Hillenbrand et al., 1995, p.1304) 28 Tải FULL (75 trang): https://bit.ly/3AyIzxF Dự phòng: fb.com/TaiHo123doc.net The average formant frequencies of pure vowels produced by American women (Hillenbrand et al., 1995, p.1304) It is clear from the charts that, although the absolute values of the formant frequencies between men and women are significantly different, due to the anatomical differences between two sexes, the relative positions of the monophthongs on the charts, indicating how these vowels are articulated, are strikingly similar 29 Chapter RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 3.1 The subjects Ten female speakers of Hanoi Vietnamese were chosen in a procedure as follows First, 20 females aged from 15 to 25, who claimed to have spent most of their life, since being born, in Hanoi were chosen to take part in a recording process They were then asked to read a short piece of Vietnamese scripts (Appendix 2) After that each of the recordings was played back to all the subjects, except for the person producing it The listeners were asked to judge whether each piece of speech sounds typically Hanoi Vietnamese, giving a score ranging from one to ten, with ten being most typical, and one being the least Ten of the twenty subjects who achieved the highest scores were selected This procedure ensured the high homogeneity among the subjects 3.2 The stimuli Tải FULL (75 trang): https://bit.ly/3AyIzxF Dự phòng: fb.com/TaiHo123doc.net Thirteen Vietnamese monophthongs were investigated In different accounts proposed by different authors, as discussed in the review of literature, the number of monophthongs in the system is a matter of controversy Whether the pairs of vowels, as in anh (brother) and xe (vehicle), ong (bee) and oong, and hay (interesting), hơ and hân should be described as two vowels in long-short opposition, having the same vowel qualities, represented by /ɛ̆/ and /ɛ/ /ɔ̃/ and /ɔ/ , / / and /ă/, /ɤ/ and /ɤ̆/ respectively, or they are vowels with 30 distinct quality, or /ɛ̆/, /ɔ̃/, /ă/, and /ɤ̆/ are allophones of the longer counterparts, have divided linguists The current research treated them as being distinct from each other, either in terms of the qualities or duration; therefore, the quality of these thirteen vowels, which is the largest inventory proposed so far, were investigated Based on the results of the acoustic analysis of F1 and F2, the controversial matters would be discussed in the section of findings and discussion To record the subjects’ production of these vowels, /i, e, ɛ, ɛ̆, ɯ, u, o, ɔ, ɔ̆, ɤ, ɤ̆, a, ă/ were divided into two sets The first set, including /i, e, ɛ, ɯ, u, o, ɔ, ɤ, a,/ are represented by the corresponding letters in the Vietnamese alphabet, i, ê, e, ư, u, ô, o, ơ, a The second set, including, /ɛ̆/, /ɔ̆/, /ɤ̆/, and /ă/, as described by linguists, have limited distribution Therefore, they are realized in four words, anh, óc, ân, ay respectively 3.3 The recording process The subjects were required to say the given words and letters two times to the Shure PG27USB microphone, with the relevant specifications information provided by the producer as follows:  Frequency Response: 20 to 20,000 Hz  Power Requirements: USB-powered, 500 mA maximum  Sampling Rate: up to 48 kHz The USB Plug and Play microphone was chosen instead of the traditional plug as suggested by Jonhson (personal communication, 31 6814448 ...Vietnam national university, Hanoi University of languages and international studies Faculty of Post graduate studies DOÃN MINH MÃO A comparative acoustic study of Hanoi Vietnamese and general American. .. English and of Hanoi Vietnamese are acknowledged as the reference accents of English and Vietnamese respectively As a result, from the pedagogical aspect, the findings of the research are of highly... monophthongs and General American English monophthongs; this section is devoted for an examination of the concept of General American English (GA) and its monophthongs in literature Generally, phoneticians