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Tags:
speech, profiling

Try to pronounce the words "caught" and "cot." If you're a New Yorker by birth, the two words will sound as different as their spellings. But if you grew up in California, you probably pronounce them identically.

American English is slowly changing; across the nation, the two "low-back" vowel sounds in these words are merging, region by region. Now Christina Esposito of the Macalester College has tracked the change sweeping eastwards across the Midwest into Minnesota. She will present her findings at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) next week in San Antonio, TX.

Working with graduate students Hannah Kinney and Kaitlyn Arctander, she asked Minnesotans to read a list of 100 words that contain these vowels, recorded the speech, and analyzed patterns within the recordings.

"We make a visual representation of the speech, a spectrogram," says Esposito. "Every single vowel has its own unique frequencies, like a fingerprint."

Unlike past studies of other areas of the country, which rely interviewing people over the telephone and judging differences by ear, Esposito's experiment recorded and dissected the speech quantitatively. Her results suggest that 30 percent of Minnesotans have lost the distinction between the two vowel sounds.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by the American Institute of Physics

Comments:

1.	elissa san giovanni
	11/9/2009 11:26:07 AM MST
	This is very true and a very important element in teaching reading. I take 12 -17 yr olds, who lack terribly in reading skills and take them back to the beginning of the alphabet and show and teach them that every single letter has a different sound. How these sounds are pronounced are influenced by the other letters around them, but they still have their own distinct sounds ex. orange/or----orange/are-ange. Different locals=dialects is an influence upon the community. But when a person takes diction lessons, such as a TV announcer, these distinctions are clearly made. When children are taught the basic sounds of every letter and then the process of the vowels and consanants around them that change that basic sound, they become much better readers and articulators.