Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics vol. 46 (4), 2010

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TOWARDS A GRADUAL SCALE OF VOWEL REDUCTION: A PILOT STUDY
(Versita Ltd., de Gruyter, 2010) Kul, Małgorzata
The study reports the results of an acoustic analysis of vowel reduction of the /iː/ vowel, consid- ering all three traditionally explored aspects of vowel reduction, i.e. duration, F1 and F2 in read speech produced by 12 native speakers of English. Starting from the observation that the standard literature considers only duration as a proxy for overall reduction, the aim of the study is to ver- ify whether duration, F1 and F2 exhibit reduction (construed as shortening of duration and cen- tralization of formants, respectively) to the same degree. The r test reveals the lack of a robust linear correlation between duration, F1 and F2, the highest value being 0.51 (the correlation be- tween duration and F1) and 0.24 (the correlation between duration and F2), neither of which is a strong correlation. In light of the results, the study seeks to establish a gradual scale of vowel re- duction, combining the spatial and the temporal aspects by means of averaging the distances be- tween the least and the most reduced tokens across duration, F1/F2 on an equal basis. The result- ing degree is expressed on a scale of reduction, ranging from 0 (no reduction whatsoever) to 100 per cent (reduction to schwa).