A pilot sociophonetic study on open-mid vowels uttered by young male and female speakers of the Pisan variety

Abstract

Based on a small dataset of spontaneous speech produced by 6 speakers aged 18-20, this study aims to acoustically describe vowel quality in the Pisan variety of Italian with respect to male-female differences. The Pisan variety is characterized by the lowering of [ɛ] and [ɔ], which is said to be a sociophonetic cue of vernacular speech. The initial aim was to explore whether gender-related sociophonetic differences influence the production of [ɛ] and [ɔ] in young speakers, and which of the two groups (males or females) were more likely to adopt this vernacular feature. However, we did not find consistent evidence of [ɛ] and [ɔ] lowering in the analyzed corpus. Nevertheless, there was variation in the production of [ɛ], which differentiated the male Pisan speakers from their Florentine counterparts. For this reason, this study also tested an automatic classification system of [ɛ] vowels, which could predict with decent accuracy (77%) the variety to which a specific vowel token belonged.