full-fledged pidgin

I’m posting this exercise out of order because the other two are in states of not-yet-quite-completion. Maybe when they’re done and posted I’ll figure out how to resort the main page.

A. Guinea pigging

toons --> twos

B. Acoustic measurements of the stimuli

[ see tables: below ]

C. Answer some questions

question 1

My boundary for the `twos’ continuum appears to be at 11 also. My boundary on the `toons’ continuum is at 10, however. The difference is hard to explain. My first hypothesis, having measured the data, is that the same 4ms change in nasal vowel length (from 30 to 26ms) happens in the `twos’ and `toons’ continua at t11 and t10, respectively. My perceptual boundary appears to have been at the same physical point on both continua — these points were just not synchronized with one another in the stimuli. I note that this 30ms point is the first token that is less than half the length of the /n/ in `toons_1′.

question 2

The vowel is ~36.4 in the natural `twos’ than in the (almost) natural `toons’. Part of this might be maintaining the duration required for these stressed syllables to sound “natural”? The vowel and nasal durations are changing in an inverse, linear relationship to one another.

question 3

All four actually sound pretty good to me! and it’s because of the last part of your question. After many listenings I can identify `twos_1.wav’ as sounding decidedly “Irish” to me. My mom and dad emigrated here from Ireland before I was born, I’ve spent a lot of time there, most of our family friends are also emigrants, and I grew up hearing a lot of Irish-English. Dad was a musician, mom is a dancer — `tunes’ is most definitely in the high end of the Zipfian curve describing my linguistic experience. `twos_1.wav’ sounds so much like the Irish-English `tunes’ that I had difficulty realizing why it didn’t sound odd to me. :)

question 4

( can’t represent these in plain html, I’m afraid. What I’ve represented as the arpabet schwa [ax] is probably something closer to a barred-i. I just wanted to capture that the vowel sounds diphthongal to me in twos_1 and twos_16. )

D. DIY Perception Experiment

This sounds incredibly fun and I *will* come back and do it, but I’m running out of time to finish implementing the Viterbi algorithm and, alas, need to go do that now.

toons to twos: vowel

toons to twos: nasal