368 Renée van Bezooijen and Vincent J. van Heuven
measure either underestimates the perceived openness of vowels in female
voices, or—more likely—that it overestimates the perceived openness of
vowel produced by men. It is important, in this context, to note that our per-
ception of vowel onset in closing diphthongs seems to have been inÀ uenced
by the magnitude of the diphthongal glide. More speci¿ cally, it seems to be
the case that a rather open /͑i/ onset is perceived as relatively close when
the diphthongal glide is (almost) absent. It is unclear at this stage how this
effect—if it were found to be reproducible with other phonetically trained
listeners—should be explained.
- Study 3: Evaluation of Avant-garde /͑͑i/
4.1 Method
4.1.1 Speakers
Listeners heard the speech of twelve women. Three of the speakers spoke
Avant-garde Dutch, three spoke Dutch with a typically Amsterdam accent,
three spoke different variants of Randstad Dutch (the Randstad, or City Belt, is
the heavily urbanized western part of the Netherlands), and three spoke Stan-
dard Dutch. Avant-garde Dutch is the focus of this study, the three other variet-
ies served as reference points. Randstad and Amsterdam Dutch were chosen
as reference conditions because some people consider Avant-garde Dutch as
“just another Randstad accent.” We were curious to see whether Avant-garde
Dutch would be evaluated different from regional accents from the Randstad.
Standard Dutch was included as the traditional norm for spoken Dutch.
The speakers of Avant-garde Dutch had been selected by Stroop as good
representatives of Avant-garde Dutch, mainly on the basis of their realization of
/͑i/. The three speakers with an Amsterdam accent were all born and raised in
Amsterdam; they manifested some typical Amsterdam features such as palatal-
ization of /n/, /s/ and /t/, and rounding of /a:/. The three speakers with a Randstad
accent originated from smaller towns in the Randstad. Their accents were not
identical but all had clear Randstad elements, such as devoicing of /v/ and /z/
and diphtongization of /e:/ and /o:/. The three representatives of Standard Dutch
had been judged by a panel of ¿ ve phoneticians to speak (almost) perfect Stan-
dard Dutch. They had none of the Avant-garde Dutch, Amsterdam or Randstad
features characteristic of the other three groups of speakers.
According to Stroop (1998), typical speakers of Avant-garde Dutch are of the
female sex, between 25 and 40 years of age, and highly educated. The speakers