Frequency analyses of American English vowels

Abstract

Analyses were made of acoustic data derived from spectrographic measurements of ten American English vowels spoken by 15 children, 33 men, and 28 women talkers [G. E. Peterson and H. L. Barney, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 24, 175–184 (1952)]. Frequencies of F0, F1, F2, and F3 were converted to the Bark scale, an auditory scale of perceived pitch in units of critical bands. A critical distance between formants of about 3.5 Bark has been reported to be important in the perception of synthetic Russian vowel quality [L. A. Chistovich, R. L. Sheikin, and V. V. Lublinskaya, Frontiers Speech Commun. Res., 143–157 (1979)]. Three distance measures were calculated from the Bark‐transformed Peterson and Barney data: F1−F0, F2−F1, and F3−F2. Each of the three distance measures was binarily classified according to whether or not frequency differences exceeded 3.5 Bark. These binary classifications related to the linguistic dimensions of vowel height, compactness, and place of articulation. The procedure also served as a normalization technique. [Work supported by NIH and performed in part at the Research Lab. of Electronics, MIT.]