Articulatory and acoustic variability of vowels in Japanese and English

Abstract

Measures of formant frequencies and x-ray microbeam representations of partial mid-sagittal tongue contours were made at discrete moments in time for single tokens of each of five brief isolated vowels /i e a o u/ produced by seven native adult speakers of Japanese, and ten comparable speakers of American English. The broad purposes of these measurements were twofold: (1) to increase basic understanding of the relationship between articulatory postures and their acoustic correlates during production of isolated vowels; and (2) to develop preliminary estimates of the extent of articulatory and acoustical variability in vowel production in the two languages. The analysis of patterns among lingual contours achieved by different speakers raises problems regarding normalized description of vowel gestures. Methodological approaches to these problems, and their effects on descriptive summaries of the data, will be discussed. [Work supported by ATR Inf. Proc. Res. Labs. and NIH Grant No. DC00820.]