The role of vowel inherent spectral change in the intelligibility of English vowels spoken by English-, Chinese-, and Korean-native speakers

Abstract

This study is designed to investigate the relationship between Vowel Inherent Spectral Change (VISC) and vowel intelligibility of native and non-native speakers of English. VISC refers to the relatively slow varying changes in formant frequencies associated with each vowel category (Neary and Assman, 1986). Such spectral change has been known to be a major factor in the perception of both the phonetic and phonemic English vowels. In the previous research projects conducted in our lab, we recorded 12 English vowels in /hVd/ format spoken by English native (EN), Chinese native (CN) and Korean native (KN) speakers and examined vowel intelligibility. Overall, vowel intelligibility was significantly higher for native talkers than for non-native talkers. Within non-native speaker groups, CN had slightly higher intelligibility than KN speakers. In this study, we are going to analyze an acoustic feature of the vowels, VISC, spoken by these native and non-native speakers. It is hypothesized that the acoustic differences of vowels spoken by different groups of speakers can account for the variances in vowel intelligibility.