Word List, F1, F2 and more!

In the beginning, this exercise was very confusing for me. I couldn't figure out how to get the formants on Praat. So I was a bit frustrated. But I soon figured it out and now I know a lot more about how to work with the spectrograms. I recorded the words "heed, hid , head, had, hod, hawed, hood, who'd" in Praat. Then I created a spectrogram and clicked "show formants". Then there was another tab that would tell me the F1 and F2 of each area on the spectrogram that represented a different vowel. I recorded these values and plotted them on the graph from the reading. I compared my graph to the graph in the reading that was also of an American accent and the same word list. Nearly all of my formant values are smaller than the graph provided. Also, the differences between my F1 and F2 values for each vowel sound is much smaller than the differences found in the graph provided. But the general location of the vowel sound formant relative to each other is somewhat the same. So in general, I pronounced the vowels like most Americans, but I may have spoken quieter or in a different way so that I got differing smaller formant values. Overall, the activity was fun and taught me more about Praat.
Class discussions, I thought, brought up many important points that may often be lost in the technicalities of linguistics. I'm really glad we talked about the implications of accents in our everyday lives at times we may not even realize. It showed how language is not just how we speak, it is part of how we think.