Formant trajectory analysis using dynamic time warping: Preliminary results
Kirsten T. Regier · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2014
In English, there are at least two mechanisms that affect vowel duration—vowel identity and postvocalic consonant voicing. Previous studies have shown that these two mechanisms have independent effects on vowel duration (Port 1981, Todt 2010). This study presents preliminary results on the use of dynamic time warping to distinguish between the effects of vowel identity and postvocalic consonant voicing on the formant trajectories of English front vowels. Using PraatR (Albin 2014), formant trajectories are extracted from sound files in Praat and imported into R, where the dynamic time warping analysis is conducted using the dtw package (Giorgino 2009). Albin, A. L. (2014). PraatR: An architecture for controlling the phonetics software “Praat” with the R programming language. JASA 135, 2198. Giorgino T. (2009). “Computing and Visualizing Dynamic Time Warping Alignments in R: The dtw Package,”J. Stat. Software, 31(7), pp. 1–24. Port, R. F. (1981). Linguistic timing factors in combination. JASA 69(1), 262–274. R Core Team (2014). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. Todt, K. R. (2010). The production of English front vowels by Spanish speakers: A study of vowel duration based on vowel tenseness and consonant voicing, JASA 128, 2489.