Acoustic characteristics of American English vowels

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to replicate and extend the classic study of vowel acoustics by Peterson and Barney (PB) [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 24, 175-184 (1952)]. Recordings were made of 45 men, 48 women, and 46 children producing the vowels /i,I,e, epsilon,ae,a, [symbol: see text],O,U,u, lambda,3 iota/ in h-V-d syllables. Formant contours for F1-F4 were measured from LPC spectra using a custom interactive editing tool. For comparison with the PB data, formant patterns were sampled at a time that was judged by visual inspection to be maximally steady. Analysis of the formant data shows numerous differences between the present data and those of PB, both in terms of average frequencies of F1 and F2, and the degree of overlap among adjacent vowels. As with the original study, listening tests showed that the signals were nearly always identified as the vowel intended by the talker. Discriminant analysis showed that the vowels were more poorly separated than the PB data based on a static sample of the formant pattern. However, the vowels can be separated with a high degree of accuracy if duration and spectral change information is included.

Midbrain Synchrony to Envelope Structure Supports Behavioral Sensitivity to Single-Formant Vowel-Like Sounds in Noise

“…F1 and F2 are sufficient for vowel identification. Vowels were synthesized (Klatt and Klatt 1990) with fundamental frequency (F0) of 125 Hz and with four formant frequencies (Hillenbrand et al 1995). b Single-formant stimuli used to study discrimination of formant frequency.…”

“…Each vowel contains energy concentrated at several spectral peaks, or formant frequencies, created by vocal tract filtering. The lowest two formant frequencies are typically sufficient for identification of vowels (Fant 1960;Hillenbrand et al 1995). The neural mechanisms underlying auditory discrimination of vowels are poorly understood.…”

Dimensions of Segmental Variability: Interaction of Prosody and Surprisal in Six Languages

“…Formant values were cleaned and manually checked when they were 200 Hz above or below average values for each language, if the range of dispersion in the data was not provided in the literature (Wiik, 1965;Majewski and Hollien, 1967;Hillenbrand et al, 1995;Liénard and Di Benedetto, 1999), and below or above attested measures of variability otherwise Sendlmeier and Seebode, 2006;Skarnitzl and Volin, 2012). Then, speaker-dependent standard normalization was applied to control for differences in formant values due to speaker identity and sex (Lobanov, 1971).…”

Static and dynamic spectral properties of the monophthong vowels in Seoul Korean: Implication on sound change

“…예를 들어, Yang(1996) (Hillenbrand et al, 1995;Nearey, 2013;Haddican, 2013). Hillenbrand et al(1995)는 영어 단모음 /ae, ε/의 안정구간 …”