Where's That Vowel?

One of the things Video Voice is helpful with is training production and differentiation of vowel sounds. In fact, in its original, prototype form, with only an F2/F1 display, that’s all it really could do!  The people who developed it were particularly interested in vowel production work, and based the display on Grant Fairbanks’ 1959 Voice and Articulation Drill Book (see History of Video Voice http://videovoicetalk.blogspot.com/2011_03_01_archive.html). 

In the F2/F1 display, vowels map into regions of the screen that generally correspond to place of production in the mouth, where the left side of the screen is the front of the mouth, and the right side, the back. The sample screen below illustrates this with a high front vowel (/i/) and a low back vowel (/a/) map in this display.

Minor changes in articulator position can affect the sounds that are produced, but the ear is ingeniously capable of differentiating, or in some cases, "glossing over" them. The difference between the long and short "E" sounds ("beet" and "bit") is a slight relaxation of the tongue away from the hard palate. These subtle differences can be difficult for speakers of other languages to hear and master, although they make a very real difference to native speakers. The difference in meaning is significant, for example, with something like "sheet metal."

"ih" (as in "bit) and "eh" ("bet") are also similar sounds, although the latter is produced slightly lower and farther back in the mouth. Again, other languages may not have the same set of vowel sounds, so learning to produce and differentiate these sounds can be a challenge. The F2/F1 display can help make these subtle differences more obvious.

The "squiggly" lines that represent these sounds in the F2/F1 display are formed from the speech data  that comprises them. Some of the dots result from the initial onset of sound and trailing off to silence at the end, and those dots are less meaningful than the ones related to the actual sound, which typically appear in clusters in a general area of the screen.

If those you’re working with young children or others who find the standard F2/F1 display difficult to interpret, you can use an alternate way to illustrate sounds - the Spheres Style. This is particularly useful for single-sound targets. Activate this in the F2/F1 display after producing targets by clicking the Style control, and the patterns change from squiggly lines to blue and red spheres which illustrate the greatest density of dots in the pattern. You can then have the speaker try to match the location of vowels that way. (If you want the Style option to be the default display, use the Adjust button to change that control.)

We added this control after talking with a speech professor who was interested in exploring differences between vowel locations with groups of individuals - men vs. women, children vs. adults, native vs. non-native speakers. Pitch differences between speakers do affect the formant frequencies of sounds, and this is another way to show that fact. If you’re interested in more technical aspects of the sounds, you can dwell with your cursor over the spheres to see the F2 and F1 frequency values. (This works with the regular "squiggly" patterns as well.)

Video Voice has lots of options for changing how the displays operate to make them the most useful for people you’re working with. Any adjustable control is highlighted in cyan color, and the cursor also changes to a "hand" graphic to let you know something can be changed, and you’ll also see a "tool tip" that provides a brief description of its function. So have fun, experiment and explore all it can do!

Video Voice Support Team
1-800-537-2182
mv@videovoice.com