Abstract
An early study with synthetic speech suggested that vowel identification includes a normalization stage, such that the listener calibrates his perceptual apparatus for each talker's vowel space [Peter Ladefoged and D. E. Broadbent, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 29, 1 (1957)]. In the present study, no evidence for such a perceptual mechanism was obtained using natural speech. Each of a set of b-vowel-t test; words, spoken rapidly within a sentence carrier by an adult male was presented for recognition within the carrier in which It was uttered, appropriately embedded within an identical carrier produced by a second adult male with substantially different vocal tract dimensions, and excised from sentence context. The two talkers achieved the same pitch levels and speaking rate, with the result that mixed-talker sentences were perceived as if uttered by one talker. Errors in recognition were typically found only for isolated test words. Preliminary data from a replication of this design with more widely divergent vocal tracts (i.e., adult male and nine-year-old male) are similar. Apparently, some factors beyond the syllable shape the acoustic specification of vowels, though not in the sense in which normalization is traditionally defined.
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