Abstract
Spectral and temporal characteristics of Czech vowels in spontaneous speech
Highlights
Each of the world’s languages contrasts its vowels by their spectral quality, that is, by a set of frequency components called formants which are the resonant frequencies of the vocal tract (Fant 1960)
The results showed that the high front vowel pair is reliably distinguished by F1: the long /i/ has a smaller F1 than the short /ɪ/, by 2 ERB, a difference which by far exceeds the just noticeable difference for formants.The significant lowering of the short /ɪ/ in the vowel space is further documented by this vowel being, in terms of F1, four times closer to the short mid back /o/ than the long /i:/ is to the long mid /o:/
This finding is interesting from a cross-linguistic perspective: the F4-F3 difference that we found for Czech /i/ resembles that of the French /i/ that had been thought to exhibit a cross-linguistically unique pattern of F3-F4 focalization (Gendrot et al 2008, Vaissière 2011)
Summary
Each of the world’s languages contrasts its vowels by their spectral quality, that is, by a set of frequency components called formants which are the resonant frequencies of the vocal tract (Fant 1960). The realization of the phoneme /i/ aims at maximal F2, but the “French” F3-F4 pattern is not uncommon and has been observed in some speakers of English (Flemming, 2019). Since higher formants such as F3 and F4, and the distance between them, have been shown to cue vowel identity in at least some languages, it is desirable to include these higher formants in acoustic description of front vowels cross-linguistically
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