Qualitative and Quantitative Dynamics of Vowels

Introduction A pervasive and fundamenta l property of spoken language is the nesting of quasi-periodic structures, ranging ti'om the vibration of the vocal cords to the iteration of syllables, accents, and higher-order prosodic objects. The long-range goal of the research reported here is to bring to bear on the study of this phenomenon the methods and insights of the study of dynamical systems, in the hope t h a t th is will increase our unders tanding of the computation of spoken language. In this paper, we describe this point of view and illustrate the results we have obtained to date in a study of English vowels, within and across individual speakers.