Testing theories of vowel inherent spectral change

Testing theories of vowel inherent spectral change.

Three competing accounts of vowel inherent spectral change in English all agree on the importance of initial formant frequencies; however, they disagree about the nature of the perceptually relevant aspects of formant change. The onset+offset hypothesis claims that the final formant values themselves matter. The onset+slope hypothesis claims that only the rate of change counts. The onset+direct...

Beyond North American English: modelling vowel inherent spectral change in British English and Dutch

Theories and methods modelling vowel quality in terms of vowel inherent spectral change (VISC) have been developed and tested overwhelmingly on North American English (AE) dialects, which raises the question of their generalisability in non-AE dialects and other languages. The present paper examines VISC as an aspect of vowel quality in Standard Southern British English (SSBE) and Northern Stan...

On the Inherent Incompleteness of Scientific Theories

__________________________________________________________________________________________ We examine the question of whether scientific theories can ever be complete. For two closely related reasons, we will argue that they cannot. The first reason is the inability to determine what are “valid empirical observations”, a result that is based on a self-reference Gödel/Tarski-like proof. The seco...

Vowel recognition: Formants, Spectral Peaks,

On Certain Spectral Features Inherent to Scalar Type Spectral Operators

Important spectral features, such as the emptiness of the residual spectrum, countability of the point spectrum, provided the space is separable, and a characterization of spectral gap at 0, known to hold for bounded scalar type spectral operators, are shown to naturally transfer to the unbounded case. Curiosity is the lust of the mind.