so for my speech pathology class, i told my professor about how i plotted my vowels last year and i offered to make some slides and show-and-tell some things about the so-called “vowel space” to our class. i basically go over a basic methodology of vowel measurement, then present my vowel space with some observations and give some take-home big ideas that might be helpful to budding phoneticians. here are the big ideas:
- Vowel space is tricky.
- Vowel space is more relational than absolute.
- Context of a vowel matters but not too much.
- …except for when it does matter (i.e. phonological language difference).
the above image shows my diphthongs—oy in boy, ow in cow, ai in bye—in the vowel space. left is towards the front of the mouth and up is towards the top of the mouth. diphthongs are “double vowels” so this plot shows the heads, tails and trajectories of my vowels. i have something normally referred to as “canadian raising” where i have appreciably different vowels in the words ice and eyes (green vs red), and to a lesser extent, in kraut and crowd (blue vs orange).
