Individual differences in the perception of isolated vowels and vowels in a consonantal context

Abstract

Previous studies comparing the perception of isolated vowels with that of vowels produced in some consonantal context have generally focused on similarities and differences in the average performance of subjects in the two conditions. In this investigation, we wanted to look carefully at individual differences in vowel perception both within and between these conditions. We did so with the aid of a nonmetric individual differences scaling procedure developed by Takane et al. [Psychometrika 42, 7–67 (1977)]. The variance common to all subjects (in the two conditions combined) was modeled in a single multidimensional space, and the individual differences were represented as weights (or saliences) that each subject attached to the dimensions of the space. The data were similarity judgments collected (with the method of triadic comparisons) for a set of isolated vowels and for a set of vowels in context recorded by the same talker. The perceptual space had three dimensions. The first of these corresponded clo...