Non-uniform vowel normalization

A study of female-male differences in F F2: and F3 of var ious vowels within eight different languages revea ls univer sa l tendencies of departure f rom a simple uniform scaling. These have been quantified and adopted a s a basis for a vowel-category-specific normalization procedure which, on the average, reduces the female-male variance to one-half of that remaining after a simple uniform scaling of the type suggested by Nordstrom and Lindblom (paper 212 presented a t the 8th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Leeds 1975). Dialectal variations within a speaker group a r e thus of the same order of magnitude a s a universal pattern of deviations f rom a simple scale factor. P a r t s of this pattern can be ascr ibed to non-uniform scaling of vocalt r ac t dimensions. Other p a r t s requi re the assumption of sexspecific articulation which may have developed to satisfy per ceptual c r i te r ia . I t i s interesting to note that the scaling of tenor formants versus bass singers ' formants a r e s imilar to the female-male scaling (demonstrated by Tom Cleveland in a forthcoming paper).