Figure 1.
The relative position of formants in high front and low back vowels.
Spectrograms showing a 175 cm tall male (a and b), and a 165 cm tall female (c and d) saying “mil” (high front vowel phoneme, spectrograms (a) and (c)) and “mal” (low back vowel phoneme, spectrograms (b) and (d)). The positions of the first three formants are labelled F1– first formant, F2– second formant, F3– third formant. Lower frequencies of F2 and lower dispersion between F1 and F2 can be seen in “mal” compared to “mil”. Overall, lower formant frequencies can be seen in the taller male voice compared to the shorter female voice. Spectrograms generated using Seewave [57], formants measured using Praat [58].
Table 1.
Examples of the magnitude conveyed by vowel phonemes, from Johnson [31].
Table 2.
Popular name data sources.
Figure 2.
The mean number of names per phoneme for each phoneme size category.
Closed circles = Female names, Open circles = Male names.