Strategies of vowel reduction - a speaker-dependent phenomenon

In natural speech, a lot of interand intra-subject variation in the realisation of vowels is found. Perception experiments show that listeners can discriminate speaker-independent levels of vowel reduction. The question is whether all speakers used the same acoustic cues for signalling reduction levels. The acoustic realisation of reduction levels of the vowels [u:], [i:], and [a:] of three speakers were tested for their separability and their predictability using linear discriminant analysis, support vector machines, and artificial neural networks. The results indicate a speaker-dependent realisation of vowel reduction.