Gender-specific Differences in the Articulatory and Acoustic Realization of Interword Vowel Sequences in American English

Differences in male and female vocal tract dimensions are hypothesized to have a number of dynamic consequences – undershoot, greater acoustic vowel space size, articulatory speed. Evidence for some of these predictions is sought by investigating articulatory and acoustic patterns in interword vowel sequences in the University of Wisconsin X-ray Microbeam Speech Production Database (UWDB). Means of formant and normalized lingual pellet tracks throughout such vocalic stretches exhibit similarities in acoustic and articulatory form for male and female groups, but show significant gender-specific differences in both articulatory and acoustic space traversed, with females making greater acoustic excursions for shorter articulatory distances.