praat spectrogram

After messing around with Praat for two hours, I decided to actually do the assignment, but a little differently. Because I am absolutely horrible at mimicking American accents, I had my roommate say the same sentence as I did. I said the sentence: I caught the fluttering bag. My roommate is Chicana (though she doesn't really have a "Spanish" accent) and is from East Palo Alto...basically five minutes from here. Though we both have relatively dondescript (I use this term loosesly) accents, there were sublte differences that were visible with the help of Praat.

Main audible differences: we say the word "caught" differently; she says it like "cot" and I don't, she says "fluttering" more like fluttereeng, and I say "bag" almost with a long "a" sound.

Main visual differences: The lines/darker areas indicating vowels...I think...are shorter on the specogram of my roommate's voice. In the spectogram of my voice, when I say the word "bag" the line drops, not the amplitude, but the blue line plummets when I prounounce the letter "a." When my roommate says "fluttering", on the spectogram, there is a "gap" between the time that she says the "fl" and "uttering" parts of the word...could this be an aspiration, as in "flHuttering?"

Praat is supprisingly entertaining to use, and it is very interesting to see how something that we think is so ubiquitous, like vocalization, is very diverse.