Acoustic Disparities between English and Igbo Front Vowels

Abstract

Acoustic phonetics refer to the study of the properties of speech in form of sound waves. It is interested in sound as soon as it leaves the mouth, just before it enters the hearer’s ears. Acoustics is the study of the properties of sounds usually with the use of instruments like computer. This works focuses on portraying the properties of the front vowels sounds in English and Igbo language with the aim of identifying and describing their similarities and differences. This would be carried out with the use of a computer program called Praat. The data used in this work is from existing literature on the classification of English and Igbo front vowels. The work concludes that the similarities between the acoustic properties of the English and Igbo front vowel sounds are greater than their differences.