Correlation between vowel production and perception for a given speaker

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to investigate the correlation between production and perception of 10 French oral vowels at the individual level. Acoustic data (F1, F2 and F3) from 10 French native speakers were collected. Measurements were obtained from the mid-point of the vowels using cepstral analysis. Each vowel was represented by 10 measurements. The same 10 speakers were subjected to perceptual experiments in which 53 synthetic vowel stimuli covering the entire vowel space were presented through headphones. The subject’s task was to identify which French word from a list of 10 words (from the same list used in the production experiment) representing the 10 French oral vowels. Each synthetic stimulus was presented 10 times in randomized order. Subject responses were mapped in a F1-F2 space with groupings corresponding to 90% of identical labeling. These perceptual results were compared with the measurements obtained from the production data. Our results show that the target values in the perceptual domain are correlated for a given subject with this production data. This conclusion is extremely important for understanding how individual variations within the same Linguistic Community can be the source of sound change. [Work supported by CNRS-GDR Cognition and Linguistic Diversity.]