had, hid, head, etc.

I really enjoyed working on this assignment. After recording the various words (carefully making a distinction between "hod" and "hawed," which I might normally pronounce the same), I used Praat's formant listing tool to get the frequencies of the first and second formants. When I graphed the results, the graph was shaped like Figure 8.7, but there were a few differences. First, my graph was shifted left and down because my frequencies were higher than the example's. I assume this is because the example was based on a recording of a man. Second, my "hood" and "hid" were closer together in F2 pitch. The same thing happened with "heed" and "who'd." I was wondering if this had to do with the Southern shift we studied or if it is something else altogether. 

Linguistic Profiling

1. I guessed black, which was correct. I think it had something to do with the pronunciation of "where" and the cadence of "to go."

2. Two for two so far. I guessed white, because the accent sounded fairly neutral to me. 

3. Okay, this one was tough for me. I actually thought it sounded a little Scandinavian, which was not a choice. In fact, black was my last guess!

4. I got this one right. I guessed hispanic, but I'm not sure what led me to that conclusion. I think it was something about the pronunciation of "Mary."

5. I had no clue. I guessed white, black, then hispanic. 

6. This one I was pretty confident about. I guessed hispanic because of the way he said "snow." It sounded similar to the Spanish "no" to me. 

7.  This was a toss up between Middle Eastern and Indian. I think it was something about the rhythm of the speech that led me to this conclusion. 

8. I guessed hispanic first, then black without a specific reason.

9. White was my first guess, again because it sounded neutral. 

10. I was probably most confident about this answer, because the recording sounded much like an Indian-American man I know at home. Even his little slip-ups were similar.  

Attempt at Imitation

For my recording of "The butter spilled on the cot," I decided to imitate a Wisconsin accent. To do this, I had a guy down the hall from Wisconsin repeat the phrase again and again. At first, it was hard for me to even get close to the way he said "cot." Eventually, though, I think I got a fairly decent recording of the sentence mainly focusing on the words "butter," "on," and "cot." I thought butter might be a word that he would pronounce differently, but as far as I could tell, our pronunciations were the same. It was interesting to record myself, as well. Before hand, I thought I pronounced the "t"s in butter, but after listening to myself, I say more of a "d" sound. 

When I looked at the spectrograms, they seemed to be similar. The two recordings were about the same length, and even the amount of time on each word was close. The frequencies, however, varied a lot. The Wisconsin take ranged from 663.1 to 1564 Hz, while my normal take ranged from 1130 to 1964 Hz. Also, the amplitude on the Wisconsin recording of the vowel sound in "cot" was much higher than the amplitude on the same vowel in the other recording.

phonetic alphabet & regional accents

I really "Mountain Speech," the article we read in class on Monday. It was interesting to see how a person with no linguistic background tried to explain the "rules" of a dialect. This article also showed me how important the phonetic alphabet for communicating about pronunciation. In "Mountain Speech," the author often tried to explain how words were pronounced by spelling them out "phonetically" (ex. window = winder). Usually, it made sense, but in some instances, I wasn't sure how the "phonetic" translation would be pronounced. (ex. sa-ick, sa = suh as in sun or sa as in sack?). If the real phonetic spelling had been used, however, this would have been easy to determine. 

When we went over the phonetic alphabet, I was surprised at the sheer number of possible sounds, and how few I could make myself. Pretty much any epiglottal or glottal sound was out of my reach. It would be interesting to know which sounds are the most common across languages and how many occur in just a few languages at all. A lot of sounds also means a lot of symbols to learn! I feel like I'm starting a whole new language.

sound, syntax, vocabulary

Of the three, I think sound is the most important for comprehension. Although syntax is important, I cannot think of a situation in which syntax was the root of a miscommunication. Vocabulary, I think, can sometimes be an issue, but it is generally resolved through context. Even if someone uses a word I'm not familiar with, usually I am able to guess its meaning or at least come close. Sounds, however, cause real miscommunication issues. I have recorded two instances in my data notebook so far, and both have had their root in sound differences. Also, both involved foreign students whose pronunciations of common words were just different enough that I didn't get it, even when they repeated themselves.