The Acoustic Correlates of [±ATR] Vowels: An Analysis by Reference Levels of Anyi Vowels

This paper pursues two goals simultaneously. First, it seeks to describe the [±ATR] vowels of Anyi Morofu acoustically by investigating six correlates: F0, F1, F2, F3, intensity, and duration. Anyi has a nine-vowel system that is divided evenly among four [+ATR] and four [-ATR] vowels. The vowel /a/ is ambidextrous in that it straddles both groups. The second goal is to demonstrate that reference levels can be used reliably to determine which one(s)of the six acoustic correlates is/are the most acoustically robust. The data that serves as the basis for this analysis comes from 10 participants who produced nine carrier sentences in which a monosyllabic verb of /hV/ structure occurred. Each sentence was repeated three times. The participants produced a total of 270 vowels (10 x 9 x 3). All in all, 1,602 acoustic tokens (270 x 6) are examined in this paper