The effect of phrasal position and type of stress on the formant features of vowels

The article deals with the effect of the stress type (neutral vs emphatic) and word position within a phrase on the formant features of a vowel sound. The above factors lead to a variation of such acoustic parameters as mean values of formants F1, F2, F3 and F4. Though it is generally believed that the above parameters can also be affected by an immediate phonetic context, results are scarce regarding the impact of the phrasal position on the formant properties of a sound in the Russian language. It also needs to be noted that the formant characteristics of a sound are heavily impacted by the speaker’s idiolect. The paper sets the task to establish regularities in formant fluctuations of the Russian sound [a] uttered in a word pronounced with a neutral and emphatic stress and occupying different phrasal positions. With this aim, the target word with the vowel under study was embedded in the carrier phrase ‘Stas ne byl tikhoney’ (‘Stas was not quiet’), the target word position in the phrase being initial, medial and final. Each phrase was uttered 20 times with neutral and emphatic stress by four Russian speakers, two males and two females. The Praat software was used to extract the mean values of formants F1, F2, F3 and F4 of the vowel [a] in the word ‘Stas’. ANOVA was performed to note the significance of difference between neutrally and emphatically stressed vowels occupying different positions in the phrase as pronounced by the four speakers. The ANOVA analysis reveals statistically significant difference among the speakers and mean formant values. Trends are hard to identify due to inconsistent variations of the parameters under study. An explanation of the results obtained is made on the basis of current speech production theories.