A Corpus for Large-Scale Phonetic Typology
Table 3: Pearson correlations (r) of mean F1 in ERB between vowel categories.
['V1', 'V2', 'Height', '# Readings', '[ITALIC] r', '[ITALIC] p']
S4SS3SSS0Px1 Vowels. (e.g., high vowels /\textipai/–/\textipau/: r = 0.79, p<0.001, mid vowels /\textipae/–/\textipao/: r = 0.62, p<0.01). Nevertheless, some vowel pairs that differed in height were also moderately correlated in mean F1 (e.g., /\textipao/–/\textipaa/: r=0.66, p<0.001). Correlations of mean F1 were overall moderate in strength, regardless of the vowels’ phonological specifications. Correlations of mean F2 were also strongest among vowels with a uniform backness specification (e.g., back vowels /\textipau/–/\textipao/: r=0.69, p<0.001; front vowels /\textipai/–/\textipaE/ The correlation between front tense vowels /\textipai/ and /\textipae/ was significant and in the expected direction, but also slightly weaker than the homologous back vowel pair (r=0.41, p<0.05). Vowels differing in backness frequently had negative correlations, which could reflect influences of category crowding or language-/speaker-specific differences in peripheralization. We leave further exploration of those relationships to future study. As formalized in the present analysis, phonetic uniformity predicts strong correlations of mean F1 among vowels with a shared height specification, and strong correlations of mean F2 among vowels with a shared backness specification. p-values are corrected for multiple comparisons using the Benjamini-Hochberg correction and a false discovery rate of 0.25 benjamini1995controlling. Significance is assessed at α = 0.05 following the correction for multiple comparisons; rows that appear in gray have correlations that are not significant according to this threshold.