A kinematic analysis of New Zealand and Australian English vowel spaces

The study presents a kinematic and acoustic comparison of the vowel spaces of New Zealand English (NZE) and Australian English (AE). Five talkers of NZE (3F and 2M) and 5 female talkers of AE each produced between 9 - 15 tokens of monophthongs in HEAD, HID, HAD, HERD. For each token, measurements of lip aperture, lip protrusion, jaw height, and tongue height and backness were made, in addition to formants and vowel duration being calculated. There were three main findings from the study. Firstly the widely held view that the NZE HID vowel may have lowered as it centralised may be incorrect. In this study results suggest that although the NZE vowel is retracted it remains a high front vowel, produced with highly approximated lips. The second result is HERD is lip rounded in both NZE and AE. The final finding is that there is no significant difference in vowel duration between NZE and AE HEAD and HAD, despite NZE HEAD and HAD being phonetically more raised. The implications of these results are discussed.