GENDER-SPECIFIC DIFFERENCES IN THE ARTICULATORY AND ACOUSTIC REALIZATION OF INTERWORD VOWEL SEQUENCES IN AMERICAN ENGLISH

Differences in male and female vocal tract dimensions are hy-pothesized to have a number of dynamic consequences – under-shoot, greater acoustic vowel space size, articulatory speed. Ev-idence for some of these predictions is sought by investigating articulatory and acoustic patterns in interword vowel sequences in the University of Wisconsin X-ray Microbeam Speech Produc-tion Database (UWDB). Means of formant and normalized lin-gual pellet tracks throughout such vocalic stretches exhibit sim-ilarities in acoustic and articulatory form for male and female groups, but show significant gender-specific differences in both articulatory and acoustic space traversed, with females making greater acoustic excursions for shorter articulatory distances.