IMPACT OF DURATION AND VOWEL INVENTORY SIZE ON FORMANT VALUES OF ORAL VOWELS: AN AUTOMATED FORMANT ANALYSIS FROM EIGHT LANGUAGES.

Eight languages (Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish) with 6 differently sized vowel inventories were analysed in terms of vowel formants. A tendency to phonetic reduction for vowels of short acoustic durations clearly emerges for all languages. The data did not provide evidence for an effect of inventory size on the global acoustic space and only the acoustic stability of quantal vowel /i/ is greater than that of other vowels in many cases. Keywords: vowel formants, adaptive dispersion, reduction, quantal theory.

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