The Sounds of English : Chapter 28

pp. 244-245

Spectrograms

What do the dark areas on a spectogram show?

 

What do the light areas show?

 

What is shown on the horizontal axis?

 

What is shown on the vertical axis?

 

In the illustrative spectrograms (eg Figure 28.2), what is the frequency spacing between the horizontal lines?

 

At what frequency is there lots of energy for /z/?

 

Apart from vowels, what other sounds have formants?

 

What does the quality of vowels depend on?

 

What do we call a dark band of energy on a spectrogram?

 

Why do the formants in /aI/ move so much?

 

Why is there less change in the formants for /eI/?