Perceptual normalization of the vowels of a man and a child in various contexts

Abstract The topic of this study is speaker normalization. Both a man and a child rapidly produced the Dutch sentences “Matroos p V t kaas” (“Sailor p V t eats cheese”): the man imitated the child's pitch. The test words p V t were presented to listeners in their original carrier sentence, in isolation, and in the other talker's carrier sentence. Especially in the latter condition considerably more vowel confusions occurred. It is argued that listeners match unknown vowels with template vowels of “average” men, women or children: the appropriate template is chosen on the basis of pitch and timbre of the unknown vowels. The vowel confusions in the present experiment can thus be explained by a confusion of templates. This explanation accounts better for the test results than the one suggested by Joos (1948) and others, that the acoustic context provides information about the formant frequencies of the talker's vowels with which a vowel space can be constructed that serves as a reference frame for the identification of the vowels in the test words.