Abstract
Vowels in continuous speech have a very wide distribution in spectral space. However, if the phonemic environment is known, it is possible to compensate for the contextual variation in the spectrum and to make the distribution compact. In this paper, an attempt is made to determine what kind of categorical item (factor) should be considered to make the distribution compact using a modified qualification theory (MQT). Although original qualification theory has the fault in that it cannot deal with correlative relations between items, this MQT can do this because it has a self‐organizing function for correlative relation. The results of an analysis of vowels in 492 words are as follows. To compensate for the variance, in /u/, it is most important to know whether the preceding sound is alveolar or not. In case the preceding sound is a labial, the place of the articulation of the next preceding sound is very important.
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