Perceived critical distances between F1−F0, F2−F1, F3−F2

Abstract

A critical spectral distance of 3 to 3.5 critical bands (bark) between first and second formant frequencies in simplified two‐formant synthetic Russian vowels has been reported by Chistovich and her colleagues. Syrdal [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 71, S105 (1982)] transformed fundamental frequency and formant frequency values from naturally produced American English vowels into Bark values from which three distance measures were calculated: F1−F0, F2−F1, and F3−F2. Her proposed auditory‐model of vowel perception reduced between‐speaker variability and provided a perceptually based quantitatively defined link between some acoustic and phonetic features. In the present series of experiments, several synthetic two‐vowel continua were constructed, each with a varying frequency parameter which crossed a critical distance in either of the 3‐bark difference dimensions. Critical distances over the 3‐bark difference dimensions, estimated by phoneme boundaries calculated from vowel identification tests, will be compared with each other and with previous estimates. Some effects of duration on the phoneme boundary estimates of critical distance will also be discussed. [Work supported by NIH].