1 Is vowel reduction centralization or contextual assimilation? Vowel reduction has traditionally been considered as centralization. A tube modelling a centralized connguration of an average sized male speaker resonates at 500 Hz, 1500 Hz, and 2500 Hz (Fant 1960). That is, the formants are evenly spaced. It was suggested that in both British and American varieties of English, most vowels approa...

In this study we investigate vowel reduction and the role of some lexical factors in the production of vowels extracted from a corpus of French conversations. Vowel durations and spectral quality are examined with respect to 1. their interaction in the corpus, 2. the position of vowels in words, and 3. word frequency and word category. The analyses are conducted on vowels produced by 16 speaker...

In natural speech there are differences in the realisation of vowels. Numerous factors such as speaking style, prosody, or word class can cause vowel reductions. It is investigated whether vowel reductions can be described using discrete levels and, if yes, how many levels can be reliably perceived. The reduction of a vowel was judged by matching stimuli to representatives of reduction levels (...

PURPOSE This article integrates published acoustic data on the development of vowel production. Age specific data on formant frequencies are considered in the light of information on the development of the vocal tract (VT) to create an anatomic-acoustic description of the maturation of the vowel acoustic space for English. METHOD Literature searches identified 14 studies reporting data on vow...

the changing of round and back vowel /u/ to unround and front vowel [i] occurs in lori dialects as well as some other persian dialects. this vowel change includes both unrounding and fronting. this paper aimed at coming up with an inclusive ranking of constraints to explain occurrence and nonoccurrence of this vowel change in various phonological environments in silahkori dialect within optimal...

ACOUSTIC VOWEL REDUCTION AS A FUNCTION OF SENTENCE ACCENT, WORD STRESS, AND WORD CLASS