Asymmetries in vowel perception, in the context of the Dispersion-Focalisation Theory

In a recent paper in this journal, Polka and Bohn [Polka, L., Bohn, O.-S., 2003. Asymmetries in vowel perception. Speech Communication 41, 221–231] display a robust asymmetry effect in vowel discrimination, present in infants as well as adults. They interpret this effect as a preference for peripheral vowels, providing an anchor for comparison. We discuss their data in the framework of the Dispersion–Focalisation Theory of vowel systems. We show that focalisation, that is the convergence between two consecutive formants in a vowel spectrum, is likely to provide the ground for anchor vowels, by increasing their perceptual salience. This enables to explain why [y] is an anchor vowel, as well as [i], [a] or [u]. Furthermore, we relate the asymmetry data to an old experiment we had done on the discrimination of focal vs. non-focal vowels. Altogether, it appears that focal vowels, more salient in perception, provide both a stable percept and a reference for comparison and categorisation.

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