The Perception of Scale in Vowels

Abstract : Previous reports presented our psychophysical findings on the perception of vowels which had been manipulated to make them sound like smaller and larger people, including some well beyond the normal range of the population. This final report includes, in addition to this previous research, an experiment showing speaker size can be extracted from a speech-like sequence of vowels that does not possess any simple spectral cue. We provide a detailed motivation and discussion of scale in vowel sounds. Our results show that we can be confident that human listeners are able to extract both vowel type and speaker size from vowel sounds even when the size and pitch are well beyond normal experience.

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