Vowels.R 1.2

I’m pleased to announce the first of some long overdue updates to the Vowels package.  Version 1.2 features “true ellipses” in the add.spread.vowelplot() function.  These “true ellipses” are oriented around the directions of variation, rather than, as before, the x- and y-axes.  (You can still use the old version; see the help documentation for vowelplot() or add.spread.vowelplot().)  As with the original version of the ellipsis plotting feature, I’m grateful to Santiago Barreda for some code.

Here’s an example:

Generated from this code:

library(vowels)
vowels <- load.vowels("http://lingtools.uoregon.edu/tools/norm/downloads/SpanishSpeakersNORM.txt")
vowelplot(compute.means(vowels, separate=T), color="speakers", label="vowels", xlim=c(2950, 750), ylim=c(1200,200))
add.spread.vowelplot(vowels, sd.mult=2, ellipsis=TRUE, color="speakers")

You can get the new Vowels version through CRAN (in your R application) or via http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/vowels/.  I aim to update the NORM site soon to offer this new feature.

PS, I’m also aware that Vowels was removed from the CRAN repository for some period of time.  Apologies for that inconvenience – it shouldn’t happen again.

Best,

Better than a change log… a blog!

Welcome to the new NORM/Vowels.R blog!  (The old change log is still available here: http://ncslaap.lib.ncsu.edu/tools/norm/changelog.php.)

Erik Thomas and I get lots of good questions about using the NORM website (http://ncslaap.lib.ncsu.edu/tools/norm/) and about the Vowels package for R, and about theoretical and methodological issues in vowel analysis more generally.  This blog is intended as a place where I can share some of these questions and some of the answers that might be more widely useful.  It’s also a place where we can make announcements about changes to the software, or bugs that users should know about.

It’s been a while since I’ve updated NORM or Vowels and I’m overdue for making some improvements.  Hopefully this blog means some long overdue updates are coming soon…

–tyler