Vowel Perception and Production

Abstract

Vowels are an important feature of the world's languages. Languages, however, differ in the number and the acoustic properties of their vowels. The two main problems of vowel perception needing explanation are vowel categorization (identification) and vowel constancy. Categorization concerns how listeners know which of the different vowels of their language has been spoken. Constancy concerns how listeners do this despite wide variations in the realization of any particular vowel. This book opens with a brief consideration of the articulation and acoustics of vowels. It shows how differences in vowels arise across languages. Succeeding chapters cover auditory processing of vowels, concentrating on perceptual determination of formant peaks. Auditory processing includes identification and discrimination, normalization across speakers, and compensating perceptually for coarticulation and effects of rate and stress. The extensive literature on these topics is reviewed and integrated. A theory of vowel perception is proposed, based on fundamental psychoacoustic results and covering a wide variety of experimental findings on vowel identification and discrimination. The theory includes a pitch transform, spectral integration and suppression effects, specification of peaks in a phonetic loudness density function, and a nearest neighbour decision procedure. The theory tries to explain both vowel categorization and vowel constancy. The book ends with a general consideration of modern theories of vowel perception.

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