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GENERAL BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON ACCENTS
The interesting thing about accents is that they change from town to town, county to county, and state to state. No matter where someone travels the accent will be slightly different than where they were born and raised. Any particular accent reflects a person’s linguistic background and the accents that they were around while growing up and learning to speak. This holds to be true and exactly the same for the northern Ohio accent and the southern Ohio accent. So since I live in southern Ohio I do have a small amount of a Southern accent. Just the same as someone from the Cleveland area has a small amount of a Northern Ohio accent.
As Clopper says about a midland speaking male in her article Acoustic Characteristics of the Vowel Systems of Six Regional Varieties of American English, “It is somewhat surprising that a single talker would exhibit both Southern /u/ fronting and Northern /ć/ raising. It is also interesting to note that the vowel /I/ is completely encompassed by the vowel /e/. This result is due to an apparent merger of these two vowels at least in terms of nucleus formant frequencies for some Midland male talkers inspection of the trajectories of these vowels for, however, suggests that the phonemic distinction is maintained through differences in the spectral change from the onset to the offset of the vowel. While /e/ moves forward and up over the middle third of the vowel, /I/ moves backward, and the offsets of the two vowels do not overlap in the F1 and F2 space.”
Reason For Experiment: When I first came to Baldwin-Wallace College people constantly asked me where I was from because they thought I had a unique accent. The weird thing is that I grew up only two hours from here in Zanesville, Ohio. So I am looking to find the difference between the southeastern Ohio accent and the northeastern Ohio accent, concentrating on vowel sounds.
Question: What are the differences in the vowel sounds of males who are from Southern Ohio and Northern Ohio?
Measurement: I am interested in the difference in frequency, pitch, and amplitude (between someone who has a northeastern Ohio accent and a southeastern Ohio accent), within different words that have different vowel sounds in them.
To do this: I plan to use a voice analyzer known as audacity to measure the vowel differences only in males.
References: Clopper, C. (2005, June 22). Acoustic characteristics of the vowel systems of six regional
varieties of American English. JASA, 1662 – 1669