@inproceedings{tanner-etal-2022-multidimensional,
    title = "Multidimensional acoustic variation in vowels across {E}nglish dialects",
    author = "Tanner, James  and
      Sonderegger, Morgan  and
      Stuart-Smith, Jane",
    editor = "Nicolai, Garrett  and
      Chodroff, Eleanor",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 19th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology",
    month = jul,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Seattle, Washington",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2022.sigmorphon-1.8/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.sigmorphon-1.8",
    pages = "72--82",
    abstract = "Vowels are typically characterized in terms of their static position in formant space, though vowels have also been long-known to undergo dynamic formant change over their timecourse. Recent studies have demonstrated that this change is highly informative for distinguishing vowels within a system, as well as providing additional resolution in characterizing differences between dialects. It remains unclear, however, how both static and dynamic representations capture the main dimensions of vowel variation across a large number of dialects. This study examines the role of static, dynamic, and duration information for 5 vowels across 21 British and North American English dialects, and observes that vowels exhibit highly structured variation across dialects, with dialects displaying similar patterns within a given vowel, broadly corresponding to a spectrum between traditional {\textquoteleft}monophthong' and {\textquoteleft}diphthong' characterizations. These findings highlight the importance of dynamic and duration information in capturing how vowels can systematically vary across a large number of dialects, and provide the first large-scale description of formant dynamics across many dialects of a single language."
}