The dynamic specification account of vowel recognition suggests that formant movement between vowel targets and consonant margins is used by listeners to recognize vowels. This study tested that account by measuring contributions to vowel recognition of dynamic (i.e., time-varying) spectral structure and coarticulatory effects on stationary structure. Adults and children (four- and seven-year-o...

Research indicates that, when the first and second formants of a vowel are separated by less than about 3.5 Bark, perception of its height and some other aspects of its quality is determined by some weighted average of the low-frequency spectrum, rather than by particular harmonic or hypothetical formant frequencies (as is the case with more widely spaced formants). This spectral averaging has ...

The vocal tract was excited transcutaneously at a point just above the glottis hy an e • ternal sweep-tone signal, in order to measure its transfer characteristics acoustically as continuous frequency functions. An analysis-by-synthesis procedure derived reliable data of vowels, in particular of the formant bandwidths, for three male and three female normal subjects. It has been shown for the c...

the aim of the present paper is to study the status of the short vowels /i/ and /u/ in five selected iranian balochi dialects. these dialects are spoken in sistan (si), saravan (sa), khash (kh), iranshahr (ir), and chabahar (ch) regions located in province sistan va baluchestan in the southeast of iran. this study investigates whether these two vowels have the same qualities as the short /i/ an...

The present study examines the acoustic vowel space of Greek and Turkish vowels produced by bilingual speakers. The results are presented for both languages’ vowels production by bilingual speakers, as well as compared with the vowels production by monolingual speakers. It is revealed that the acoustic space of the Greek vowels produced by bilingual speakers is larger than the acoustic space of...

To probe how episodic and abstract processes contribute to flexible perception of phonetically variable speech, we evaluated Australian (Aus) listeners’ perception of Aus-accented vowels versus those of an unfamiliar accent: Newcastle UK (Ncl). Aus listeners first heard a round-robin story told by multiple talkers of Aus or Ncl, then categorized multi-talker tokens of 20 vowels in nonce words s...

Previous studies have shown that the number of vowels present in one’s L1 inventory may affect the ability to learn and discriminate non-native vowel contrasts. Specifically, learners whose L1 contains fewer vowels compared to the target language may find many non-native vowel contrasts novel and have discrimination performance lower than learners whose L1 contains more vowels than the target l...