Abstract
IT has been known for some time that vowels are distinguished from one another mainly by the frequencies of the formants or regions of the auditory spectrum in which there is a comparatively large amount of energy. Recently, the hypothesis has been put forward by Joos1 that when a listener identifies the vowel in a particular word he does so not by considering the absolute value of the lowest two formant frequencies, as was previously thought, but by assessing the frequencies of these formants in relation to the formant frequencies of other vowels which he has heard pronounced by that speaker. On this hypothesis, the identification of a particular sound depends on the acoustic structure of the neighbouring sounds.
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