![]() None of the speakers had any speech or visual defect. They are native speakers of Asante Twi who can speak and write in the Twi dialect and have lived in their native places for almost all their lives. All the respondents were second year students of the University of Education Winneba. In this study, four (4) speakers, two males and two females were used in the data collection process. It sort to describe the role of gender in the production vowels of Asante Twi as produced by male and female speakers using acoustic parameters such as pitch, intensity, duration and pitch. This study was conducted through a qualitative approach. Sections such as background of the study, review of related literature, research problem, objectives and questions, methodology, data analysis and discussion of results as well as summary and conclusion will all be discussed in the subsequent pages. The study will also look at how a speaker’s gender reflects in formant frequencies, duration, pitch and intensity of vowels as far as by males and females speakers are concerned. In this study, the objective is generally to look at the possible differences in the pronunciation of the vowels of Asante Twi, a dialect of Akan, through the lens of gender (males and females). That said, it is also a popular knowledge that no two individuals speak or articulate the same way hence the need to study the variation patterns of speakers. Ladefoged (1971) recognises aspects of vocal tract shape as responsible for distinct phonetic qualities of a vowel. To this end, vowel quality is noted to play a key role in the production of words as far as meaning is concerned. Thus Chomsky and Hale (1968) summarises the role of the vowel and explains the vowel as a segment with the features + syllabic and – consonantal. Among other things, vowels perform the singular role of occupying the nucleus position in syllable of words used by different languages across the world. The production of vowe ls form a major part of the inventory of speech sounds of the world’s languages, as no spoken language is known to function properly without the inclusion of vowels. Keywords : Acoustic, vowel quality, PRAAT, intensity, duration, pitch, gender 1.INTRODUCTION Among other things, the study revealed that there exist a direct relationship between the gender or a speaker and the quality of vowel expected produced by a speaker as far as the production of Vowels of Asante Twi are concerned. In addition, female speakers’ production of vowels, particularly the back vowels have higher intensity than that of the male speakers whiles duration in nasal vowels appear to be longer than the oral vowels for both males and females. The data revealed that female speakers have higher pitch in the production of the Twi vowels as compared to the male speakers. ![]() The voices were recorded with a Huawei Y9 android smart phone and analysed with PRAAT. Sixteen vowels of Asante Twi were put in monosyllabic words for four respondents (2 males 2 females) to say them. This study discuss an acoustic analysis of male and female speakers’ production of the Vowels of Asante Twi of the Akan Language in relation to their gender. Studies on vowel quality have become fundamental in many acoustic research works on vowels and it has received some great deal of research attention by many phoneticians across the world.
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