THE IMPORTANCE OF THE THIRD FORMANT IN THE CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF BULGARIAN AND FRENCH VOWELS

Abstract

The formants taken into account in acoustic analysis of vowels are more often reduced to their two first distinctive frequency components. F2/F1 vowel space mapping is indeed essential for the acoustic description of the vowel system of any language. In addition, however, the role of F3 is known to be significant in the perception of certain vowel contrasts (or other phonetic features, as for example the rhoticity in English), and this role, as we will show, is particularly important when it comes to contrastive analysis of Bulgarian and French vowels. Neglecting the F3 is all the more unjustified given the currently available software tools.