Some contextual effects on the perception of synthetic vowels.

Abstract

The purpose of this investigation was to determine if the identification of vowel quality in selected vowel-like sounds is affected by the characteristics of an immediately preceding vowel. Listeners were presented recordings of pairs of vowels and instructed to identify the second of each pair as [i, I, ε, Λ] or [α] . The initial, or " affecting ", vowel in each pair was either [i, I, ε, Λ] or [α] ; two sets of affecting vowels were used—human and synthetic. All of the affected vowels (stimuli to to be judged) were generated synthetically; three were intended to be good examples of the vowels [I, ε, Λ], while the formant frequencies of the remaining four were intended to create ambiguous vowels (that is, two had formant frequencies between those of the synthetic vowels [I] and [ε] ; the others, between [ε] and [Λ]). Results indicate that some shift in vowel identification does occur as a function of an immediately preceding vowel. The effect, of moderate strength when the two vowels are similar, decreases as a function of the difference between the F1-F 2 ratios of the two vowels.