Audio
Audio files, along with Praat TextGrid files, are available here for many of the figures presented in the book. For these figures, you can load the audio and its associated Praat TextGrid into the Praat software (see Links page) to explore the files we used to create the screenshots presented in the book. We also provide a set of sample reading passages from the Vowels in America project.
You may need to right-click links to files to download or save the files to your computer.
Figure 2.3 Word list productions of phase [fez] and Steve [stiv] by a young male European American from North Carolina
Figure 3.1 Word list productions of bed [bɛd], bait [bet] and pail [pel] by an older female European American from Tennessee
Figure 3.6 Productions of phase [fez] and face [fes] by a young female European American from Oregon
Figure 6.1 Individual tokens of /æ/ and /ɛ/ from CORAAL speaker DCB_se3_ag3_f_01
Figures 8.2-8.4 Praat editor windows showing a sound file with orthographic transcription (manually produced, manually aligned at the utterance level) and with phonemic transcription after processing by forced alignment
A Selection of Reading Passages from the Vowels in America Project
The following audio files contain reading passage recordings by 8 speakers from the Vowels in America project. The speakers are from the three US dialect regions focused on in that work. All speakers are white (U.S. state affiliation, gender, and age group are indicated for each speaker). Along with audio files, you can download two versions of Praat TextGrids containing transcriptions of the speech. The first version is an orthographic transcript, aligned at the utterance-level. The second version is the output from the Montreal Forced Aligner, with word and phones aligned to the audio. These files can be used for practice with the vowel and sibilant analysis scripts provided on the Scripts & Code page.
Southern female 1 (Tennessee | Age 51-60)
Southern male 1 (Tennessee | Age 31-40)
Southern female 2 (Mississippi | Age 18-25)
Southern male 2 (Tennessee | Age 31-40)
Western female 1 (California | Age 18-25)
Western male 1 (Nevada | Age 18-25)
Northern female 1 (New York State | Age 18-25)
Northern male 1 (New York State | Age 18-25)
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