Differences in Finnish Front Vowel Production and Weighted Perceptual Prototypes in the F1-F2 Space

The perception and production of the mid-front Finnish vowels /i/, /e/, /y/, and /ø/ were investigated in fourteen Finnish-speaking subjects. In the perception experiment, synthesized long vowels were used as stimuli in order to identify category prototypes. For production, the subjects were asked to pronounce words including these vowels as short and long variants. This study introduces a new concept of weighted perceptual prototype, which is compared with the estimated absolute prototypes obtained in the perception experiment. The calculated mean Euclidean distance in the F1-F2 space between the produced vowels and their weighted category prototypes was 111 mel for short and 116 mel for long vowels. At an individual level, the F1 and F2 values of the weighted perceptual prototypes correlated significantly with the F1 and F2 values of the produced short and long vowels. Statistically significant differences were found between the mean values of the weighted category prototypes and estimated absolute prototypes for /i/, /e/, and /ø/ but not for /y/.