Linguistics

Cohen Priva and Strand in Journal of Phonetics on vowel reduction

Uriel Cohen Priva and Emily Strand just published an open access paper on vowel reduction in Journal of Phonetics, which shows that schwa’s acoustic location is driven by more than just coarticulatory pressures.

What leads vowels to reduce, and why do they reduce to schwa in so many languages (compare the highlighted vowel in photograph vs. photography)? In an open access paper in Journal of Phonetics, they use a spoken corpus of American English, and show that all vowels reduce when their duration gets shorter, but they do not reduce toward a schwa-like position, but toward a closer-jaw position that American English used for the vowel in wanted. They show that there needs to be another attractor, perhaps the quality of being a vowel, that involves the more open jaw position that characterizes schwa.

graph displaying vowel reduction data