Formant bandwidth is known to have little effect on vowel quality. This paper shows that it has a strong effect on mutual masking between vowels. Subjects presented with stimuli consisting of pairs of synthetic vowels were requested to report one or two vowels for each stimulus. Identification rates were calculated independently for both vowels in the stimulus. Vowels had either the same or dif...

The tense and lax vowels of German were compared, based on an analysis of the duration, amplitude and velocity characteristics of lip and tongue movement. This study examined firstly whether they show different patterns of compression over changes in speech rate, and secondly whether velocity profiles would reveal evidence of different underlying control mechanisms. CVC movements were segmented...

Recent research has shown that pseudowords created by transposing letters are very effective for activating the lexical representation of their base words (e.g., relovution activates REVOLUTION). Furthermore, pseudoword transpositions of consonants are more similar to their corresponding base words than the transposition of vowels. We report one experiment using pseudowords created by the trans...

A frequently replicated finding is that higher frequency words tend to be shorter and contain more strongly reduced vowels. However, little is known about potential differences in the articulatory gestures for high vs. low frequency words. The present study made use of electromagnetic articulography to investigate the production of two German vowels, [i] and [a], embedded in high and low freque...

This study examined cross-dialectal differences on the perception of Greek vowels. Speakers of Standard Modern Greek (SMG) and two dialectal areas (Crete, Kozani), all with five vowels in their systems, chose best exemplar locations (prototypes) for Greek vowels embedded in a carrier sentence spoken by a speaker of their dialect. The results showed that SMG, Cretan and Kozani vowels were well s...

Normal vowels are known to have irregularities in the pitch-to-pitch variation which is quite important for speech signals to be perceived as natural human sound. Such pitch-to-pitch variation of vowels is studied in the light of nonlinear dynamics. For the analysis, five normal vowels recorded from three male and two female subjects are exploited, where the vowel signals are shown to have norm...

In English, the feature [tense] or [ATR] (advanced tongue root) has been used to encompass the vowels that are produced on the extreme edges of the acoustic and articulatory spaces. The lax counterparts to these vowels are generally produced closer to the center of those spaces. The present study is based on the hypothesis that the extreme positioning in both articulatory and acoustic space evo...

This paper investigates production of the mid vowels /e, ɛ, ø, œ, o, ɔ/ by four speakers of New Caledonian French (NCF). Formant and durational properties of these vowels are examined with respect to the type of syllable in which they occur. Results point to general adherence to the loi de position in NCF, such that the close-mid vowels occur in open syllables and the open-mid vowels occur in c...

Different phonological analyses of front-mid vowels can be seen to agree on one point: =G? is more complex than ='?. Support for the validity of this claim is potentially available from perceptual and acquisitional studies. The vowels of Catalan are described, and procedures detailed which identify formant values for Catalan front-mid vowels. Empirical tests using native speakers and English co...

The present study examines the difference between categorization and goodness ratings in Udmurt (Finno-Ugric language) using different sets of spectral attributes. The tendency to have two areas of /u/ vowels was observed in languages with unrounded non-front closed vowels during the TURVOTES project. Our study explores whether this can be due to the different acoustic attributes used in the id...