Phonetics--10/23/2012

We started talking about acoustic phonetics, which is what linguists mostly use to identify and classify vowels since the vowel chart is mostly based off of theory and is pretty inaccurate because not everyone produces vowels in the same manner. The same can be said for consonants too but there is much less discrepancy for consonants than there are for vowels. We talked mostly about reading spectrograms today and we focused specifically on the formants. The formants, which are separate darker frequencies that can be seen on a spectrogram, can be seen mostly clearly in the production of vowels. It's with the vowels that they appear as distinct bands and depending on various properties of the vowel, the formants behave differently. If the vowel is high, the first formant is low and the more back the vowel is, the lower the second formant is and the third formant tends to follow the second one.