In scattered Swedish dialects, the vowels /i/ and /y/ are pronounced with a markedly low F2. This results in a ‘damped’ vowel quality that appears to be rather unusual in a typological perspective. To date, however, no experimental studies of this vowel type have been carried out using Swedish material. In this paper, formant frequencies are presented for one dialect suggesting that the /i/ vs....

The relationship between vowel nasalization and vowel quality has been examined in many studies, yet results are conflicting. This study examined nasal vowels in Pwo language. The result showed that low nasal vowels had more nasalization than mid nasal vowels. A high correlation between nasalization and vowel duration was also found. Additionally, percentages of the total nasal duration were ro...

Based on formant measurements of more than 10000 vowels from 16 German speakers, vowel quality di erences between the speakers have been analyzed. The main result of this investigation is that di erent speakers show not only di erent formant values (as one would expect due to individual di erences), but exhibit di erent arrangements in their vowel systems. These di erences are demonstrated by e...

This paper offers a phonological analysis of the compatibility between vowel quality and lexical accent in Standard Japanese (SJ). This work benefits not only from phonological considerations but also from phonetic analysis. Analyses from these two perspectives converge on the claim that the vowel /a/ attracts lexical accents, while on the other hand /u/ repels lexical accents. Acoustic measure...

This paper reports the acoustic experiment and perception test on a pair of Cantonese long and short vowels /a/ and /ɐ/ in the diphthong context. The acoustic data show that [aːi] and [ɐi] have similar targets of vowel nucleus and coda, parallel transition glide, and comparable total duration. They are different in their durational structure: [aːi] has a long steady phrase of vowel nucleus whi...

The representation of speech goals was explored using an auditory feedback paradigm. When talkers produce vowels the formant structure of which is perturbed in real time, they compensate to preserve the intended goal. When vowel formants are shifted up or down in frequency, participants change the formant frequencies in the opposite direction to the feedback perturbation. In this experiment, th...

The goal of this chapter is to provide a broad overview of work leading to the view that vowel inherent spectral change (VISC) plays a significant role in vowel perception. The view that implicitly guided vowel perception research for many years was the idea that nearly all of the information that was needed to specify vowel quality was to be found in a cross section of the vowel spectrum sampl...

Purpose The question of what type of utterance-a sustained vowel or continuous speech-is best for voice quality analysis has been extensively studied but with equivocal results. This study examines whether previously reported differences derive from the articulatory and prosodic factors occurring in continuous speech versus sustained phonation. Method Speakers with voice disorders sustained v...