An acoustic and perceptual analysis of Xhosa vowels

Abstract

There is a specific need for quantified phonetic data for linguistic and non-linguistic purposes in most of the African languages. Acoustic and perceptual qualities of vowel articulations of a fluent mother-tongue speaker of Xhosa are investigated by means of various computer-assisted techniques. Some discrepancies are shown to exist between traditional impressionistic vowel descriptions and the actual articulation of the speaker. The implications of these findings for phonetic and phonological descriptions are then discussed.