A study of the formants of the pure vowels of British English
J. C. Wells
March 1962
Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of M.A., University of London.
Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of M.A., University of London.
[This is an HTML version of the thesis just as it was written and submitted in 1962. Beyond converting it to HTML and adding some internal hyperlinks, I have made no attempt to update it. In retrospect I feel quite proud of the statistical sophistication I showed in making sure that my speaker sample was homogeneous: in these days of instant computerized ANOVAs, bear in mind that in 1962 working out standard deviations involved hours of repetitive labour with a whirring mechanical calculating machine. Note that SI units had not yet been generally adopted: cps (cycles per second) would nowadays be called Hz, and kc/s kHz. Daniel Jones's spelling tamber has not after all succeeded in displacing the spelling timbre. --JCW, February 2001]
- Abstract
- Summary of results
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Phonetic symbols
- Final note: inverse filtering
- Bibliography