An acoustic and articulatory description of the Romanian vocalic system

Abstract

This paper presents an acoustic and articulatory description of the seven standard Romanian vowels /i, ɨ, u, e, ə, o, a/. By revisiting previous instrumental studies (Avram 1963, Şuteu 1963, Teodorescu 1985, Renwick 2012), we offer a new interpretation of the material, a complementary statistical analysis, and a modern visualization of the data facilitated by R through the ggplot2 package (Wickham 2009). Another key point of this study is the ultrasound experiment conducted at ILPGA on the seven monophthongs. Finally, the acoustic data are correlated with the results obtained from the ultrasound study.

Keywords

• phonetics
• romanian vowels
• formant frequencies
• ultrasound