Practice question · Put in order
Arrange these vowels from the highest tongue position to the lowest.
- The vowel of bed
- The vowel of see
- The vowel of cat
- The vowel of father
Hints
- Height is how close the tongue body comes to the roof of the mouth.
- The vowel of see is the closest and the vowel of father the most open.
Show the answer
- The vowel of see
- The vowel of bed
- The vowel of cat
- The vowel of father
Why
The ordering also runs the other way acoustically: the highest vowel has the lowest first formant, near 300 hertz, and the most open has the highest, near 700. That inversion is why acoustic vowel charts are drawn with F1 increasing downwards, so the plot resembles the articulatory quadrilateral.
Practise English Vowels I: the Quadrilateral
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More questions on English Vowels I: the Quadrilateral
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