The Assignment

The asignment consists of two parts, a textbook portion and a Praat portion. In order to do the textbook portion you should first read chapter 1 and 2 of Byrd and Mintz. In order to do the Praat protion, you should have a look at the Praat Intro portion of these notes.

Textbook portion

Read through chapters 1 and 2 of of Byrd and Mintz. Then go back and answer the following questions which were posed in the text.

• Do Practice Transcription I and Practice Transcription II which Louis Goldstein uses in his Ling 580 class, referenced in our text on p. 39.
• Do the boxed exercise on p. 43.
• Do the boxed exercise on p. 49. Use Praat in place of Audacity. You can delete the beginning of a word by selecting the rest and doing File > Extract selected sounds. This creates a new sound object in the object window.

Praat portion

You are going to open Praat, make sound recordings, and take some measurements.

1. Make a Mono recording of yourself saying the English word heed.
2. In the objects window, select the object you just created with your recording, probably named something like Sound heed. Select View and Edit on the right.
3. In the View/Edit which appears, select Show Spectrogram from the Show spectrum menu (you will not need to do this if the spectrogram is already showing; in that case Show spectrogram will already have a check mark when you pull down the Show Spectrum menu).
4. Using your mouse, select the part of the signal which you think corresponds to the vowel. If you are having trouble, use the select menu: this separates the task of selecting the start of the vowel and the end of the vowel.
5. Under the formants menu, select Show formants. Red marks should appear in your spectrogram, highlighting the formant computed at various time intervals.
6. Under the formants menu, select Get first formant. A screen will appear with a number. Jot this number down.
7. Do the same for the second formant.

Follow steps 1-7 again, for 8 more English words:

• hid
• hayed
• head
• had
• who’d
• hood
• hoed
• hod

The last word should be pronounced to rhyme with your pronunication of cod.

If you have followed the instructions above you have run 9 trials measuring features of your pronunciation of 9 English vowels.

When you are done with all 9 vowels, visit the vowel formants webpage and report your findings there. This will allow us to compare the 9 vowels for our class population. You may visit the websight more than once if you need to do a revision or to add to existing work, but be sure to use the same user name each time, and on a second visit, answer no to the new user question. Note: There are further instructions about what to turn in below, but your assignment is not complete until you enter your results on the webpage.

What to turn in

In addition to registering your formant values on the vowel formants webpage, you should email me the following items:

1. Answers to the questions on p. 49 (see the textbook portion of the assignment); for the transcription, you may hand in a handwritten copy, and for the question on p. 43, you need to hand in a marked-up copy of a text book page.

2. A table with the 18 formant values you got on your 9 trials. Your table should look something like this:

   Word	Formant	Value
   heed	1	31
   	2	33
   hid	1	34
   	2	35
   ...	...	...
   ...	...	...

   Of course the values given here are bogus. Your table should indicate clearly what the Units of your measurements are (inches, feet, foot pounds, degrees Fahrenheit, whatever...)

3. A spectrogram image of one of your 9 trials, with a filename that tells me what word it is an spectrogram of.