On the physical interpretation of vowel quality: cinefluorographic and acoustic evidence

Abstract Experimental investigations of tongue and lip positions have failed to find well-defined, invariant relationships between tongue and lip positions and the vowel quality features of traditional phonetics. In this study, empirical evidence is reviewed and new evidence is provided that indicates that the traditional “height” and “advancement” features are more directly related to the acoustic parameters F1 and F2 than they are to measures of tongue position. Furthermore, empirical, theoretical and historical arguments are raised concerning the validity of “rounding” as an independent dimension of vowel quality.

[1]  P. Ladefoged.  A course in phonetics , 1975 .

[2]  P. Ladefoged.  Preliminaries to linguistic phonetics , 1967 .

[3]  R. Scholes.  Categorial Responses to Synthetic Vocalic Stimuli By Speakers of Various Languages , 1967, Language and speech.

[4]  R. Plomp,et al.  Perceptual and physical space of vowel sounds. , 1969, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[5]  W. A. Wickelgren,et al.  Distinctive features and errors in short-term memory for English consonants. , 1966, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[6]  P. Ladefoged.  Three areas of experimental phonetics , 1967 .

[7]  Richard A. Harshman,et al.  Cross‐Language Differences in the Perception of Natural Vowel Sounds , 1971 .

[8]  K. Stevens,et al.  An acoustical theory of vowel production and some of its implications. , 1961, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[9]  C. E. Parmenter,et al.  Vowel positions as shown by x‐ray , 1932 .

[10]  P. Ladefoged,et al.  Generating vocal tract shapes from formant frequencies. , 1978, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[11]  L. Raphael,et al.  Tongue Musculature and the Feature of Tension in English Vowels , 1975, Phonetica.

[12]  W A Wickelgren,et al.  Distinctive features and errors in short-term memory for English vowels. , 1965, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[13]  Pierre Delattre,et al.  The Physiological Interpretation of Sound Spectrograms , 1951, PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America.

[14]  C. Baltaxe,et al.  Principles of phonology , 1969 .

[15]  T. M. Nearey.  Phonetic feature systems for vowels , 1978 .

[16]  P. Ladefoged,et al.  Factor analysis of tongue shapes. , 1971, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[17]  Wilhelm Viëtor.  Elemente der Phonetik des Deutschen, Englischen und Französischen , 1898 .

[18]  K. Stevens,et al.  Development of a Quantitative Description of Vowel Articulation , 1955 .

[19]  Gunnar Fant,et al.  Speech sounds and features , 1973 .

[20]  H. Bluhme,et al.  Principles of phonometrics , 1970 .

[21]  P. Mermelstein.  Articulatory model for the study of speech production. , 1973, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[22]  Robert William Albright,et al.  The International Phonetic Alphabet: Its Backgrounds and Development , 1958 .

[23]  B. Lindblom,et al.  Acoustical consequences of lip, tongue, jaw, and larynx movement. , 1970, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[24]  M. Lindau.  Features for vowels , 1975 .

[25]  Gunnar Fant,et al.  Acoustic Theory Of Speech Production , 1960 .

[26]  J. Laver,et al.  Variability in Vowel Perception , 1965 .