Abstract
An experiment was carried out to determine the problems associated with the identification of nasal vowels in English in the context of vowel recognition using LPC‐based formant analysis. A number of tokens of three pairs of oral/nasal vowels [æ, ɛ, ɪ,] produced in similar phonetic contexts (such as in camp versus camp) were obtained from three male speakers. The first and second formant frequencies obtained as LPC spectral peaks from these pairs of vowels showed significant differences in distribution on the F1−F2 plane. The first formant frequencies of nasal vowels especially had apparent overlap with those of other nasal vowels, while oral vowels had no overlap with each other. The LPC spectra corresponding to the shifted formants and the pole‐zero pairs introduced by the nasal cavity coupling showed substantial individual differences in shape in the first formant region, including different bandwidths and number of peaks. These facts suggest the difficulty of vowel identification in (1) using the same template for both oral and nasal vowels and (2) identifying an unknown vowel even if one knows it is nasalized.
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