Heed, Hid, Head, Had, Hod, Hawed, Hood, Who'd

Although the reading was kinda tough at points, I was able to understand the vowel exercise.  I recorded myself a few times because I found myself pronouncing way too much when I thought about the words too much.  

Here's what my spectrogram looked like, starting with "heed" and ending with "who'd":

I was surprised to see that they followed the trends pretty well.  Especially on the trends of the F1 formants.  The F2s for "hod" and "hawed" were a little closer to the F1s than I thought they would be.

I was a little confused with how exactly to graph it in the blank graph, so I'll get that done in class today (I wasn't sure if the horizontal axis should be the F2-F1 or just the F2).  

Mary Had a Little Lamb

This was a really interesting test! I started out doing well but got confused by some of the Hispanic speakers. In general, I accurately guessed the races of the other speakers. It was really hard for me to place why I was able to guess the speaker's races, but I think that a lot of it was my own ear and comparing the speakers to people I know or have heard before. In addition, I think the inflection in their voices during the sentence helped me identify race. Since I couldn't go on vocabulary of syntax, I had to really listen only to sound. It made me go back to the video we watched earlier on Youtube:



And this one, too:

The Butter Spilled on the Cot

I recorded myself saying this with my normal accent first. My "cot" sound is very quick, as is "butter." Here's the spectrogram of my normal accent followed by the spectrogram of my attempt at a regional accent (see if you can guess the region):



Ok, so the main differences I see are that the "cot" sound is really long in the accented spectrogram. In addition, I think I have harder sounds in the my original recording for the "er" in butter and the "l" sounds in spilled.

The accent was supposed to be a New England accent...I think. My accent is from Washington, DC.

Regional Accents

Regional accents are hard to dislike. My favorite is probably an Appalachian accent. I find it the hardest to reproduce if you're not from there. And, it's different enough from a strict southern accent and a midwest accent that you can still place it easily. In addition, I like the variety of words and phrases that usually come with the accent. If I learn how to make the vowel sounds in an Appalachian accent, I would really like to learn how to imitate it.