Sobre la relación entre el uso de los fonemas vocálicos y factores acústico-articulatorios: primeros resultados

Abstract

It has been checked the possible existence of a statistically significant relation between the first and second formants of the Spanish vowels and the vertical movement of the thyroid cartilage during the articulation of the vowel phonemes with the frequency with which these phonemes appear in novels and theatre extracts. The first and second formant predict quite accurately the frequencies of /i,o,a/, nevertheless for /e/ the expected values are fewer than the observed ones, and the other way round for /u/. Regarding the second formant, the expected frequency of the close phonemes /i,u/  is superior to the observed ones, whereas it happens the opposite with /e,a,o/. For the degrees of freedom of the calculation made in the simple linear regression we cannot prove the existence of statistically significant relations between the movements of the thyroid cartilage and the frequency of occurrence of the vowel phonemes. Nevertheless it has been proved the existence of a relation between the vertical movement of the cartilage when pronouncing a vowel phoneme and the first and second formant.