Cardinal Vowels Research Articles

Interpreting vowel “quality”: The dimension of rounding

According to one view, speech perception depends crucially on the articulatory interpretation of the acoustic signal, since this would explain the identification of the acoustically different initial portions of two formant pseudospeech patterns such as, e.g., /di/ and /du/: Listeners “know” that their onsets are produced with very similar tongue gestures. Is this relation between perception and articulation versus acoustic signal typical, or is it instead restricted to certain phonetic units? For vowels it appears that different combinations of tongue and lip articulations yield very similar acoustic patterns and auditory qualities. The 18 “cardinal vowels” of Daniel Jones were presented to several groups of listeners asked to decide which had been produced with lip rounding. Error rates varied significantly over the vowel space, and showed a bias toward reporting front vowels as unrounded and back ones as rounded, a tendency that presumably reflects the relative frequencies across languages of front unr...

Acoustic Phonetics of Non-Nasal Standard Bengali Vowels: A Spectrographic Study

This paper presents the results of the investigations on the formant frequencies and durations of non-nasal vowels of Standard Bengali (SB). Spectrographic analysis of 350 multisyllabic words spoken by three male and three female informants provide the basic data for this study. The results confirm the existence of seven SB vowels with an additional compromise vowel. A comparative study of SB vowels with cardinal vowels and Telugu vowels indicates that SB vowels have a tendency towards centralization. The coefficients of variations of formant frequencies for different vowels are also presented. In this respect, low values are noted in case of low vowels for first formant and of high front vowel for second formant. Moreover, the variations are, in general lower for front vowels for fourth formant and the trend is opposite for the third formant. Regarding duration, it does not discriminate between male and female informants. However informant wise durational pattern shows some characteristic individuality.

Synesthesia: A principle for the relationship between the primary colors and the cardinal vowels

Synesthesia: A principle for the relationship between the primary colors and the cardinal vowels

Identification of argentine Spanish vowels

The acoustical spectrum of the five Spanish vowels |a, e, i, o, u| has been delimited to show the areas covered by F1, F2, and F3 and the relative distribution energy among the formants. Through the analysis of the spectral components of vowels, isolated and in consonantal context, it is possible to estimate the different weight of each formant in vowel identification. At least for isolated vowels,F2 andF3 seem to be effective for the identification of [i] and [e] while theF1 andF2 carry the weight for the identification of [o] and [u]. The cue to differentiate [a] seems to beF2. Spanish vowels are compared with cardinals and North American English vowels. There is no correlation with cardinal vowels while similarities are found with English vowels.

The IPA alphabet: remarks on some proposals for reform

In this journal a number of suggestions have recently been made as to possible improvements to the Association's alphabet. Some of these proposals are relatively minor, involving only the addition of symbols or diacritics; the acceptance of these would have little or no effect on the basic character of the alphabet. But others, specifically those relating to the re-organization of the Cardinal Vowels and the consonant chart, are more thorough-going. Here, important principles are involved which would seem to demand more discussion. The following remarks are intended as a contribution to this discussion rather than as an evaluation of specific proposals.

Revision of cardinal vowels, and some other problems

In a recent paper J. D. McClure (1972) objects to some basic principles of the IPA vowel system. According to him neither the division of the cardinal vowels into ‘primaries’ and ‘secondaries’, nor the mixing of rounded and unrounded in each of these two sets of vowels can be justified. It is obvious that McClure is perfectly right although he argues perhaps slightly more vigorously than needed. As a matter of fact, one wonders if anybody would wish to object to the points he is making.

A suggested revision for the Cardinal Vowel system

The Daniel Jones Cardinal Vowel system, defined as it is by clear-cut and rigid rules, is part of the stock-in-trade of all IPA phoneticians. I wish to suggest that the present format of the system contains a contradiction so basic that any attempt to make use of it as a descriptive technique, in all but a very restricted number of cases, would be completely impossible. This contradiction, moreover, is so obvious that the fact that no phonetician has called attention to it until now is hard to explain, and the equally certain fact that descriptive phoneticians (including the present writer) regularly teach the use of the technique to students, and apply it themselves, is even more so.

Factor Analyses of Format Frequencies

The exact relationship between the phonetic quality of a vowel and its formant frequencies has never been stated, because it has not been possible to account for the variations due to the personal quality of a speaker. We have analyzed the fundamental and first three formant frequencies of the eight primary cardinal vowels as spoken by 11 phoneticians using the PARAFAC procedure (Harshman, this meeting). The results were first interpreted as demonstrating three factors which corresponded to the three traditional phonetic (auditory) parameters “tongue height, tongue fronting, lip rounding.” In these vowels, “tongue fronting” and “lip rounding” co-vary. To separate these two factors, an analysis was conducted of a subset of Swedish vowels which included front rounded vowels. A factor corresponding to “tongue height” was still evident. The other two factors were not so easily interpretable. A possible interpretation of one of these two factors related it to to the Jakobsonian feature “compact.”

Vowel recognition threshold as a function of temporal segmentations.

Vowels were segmented into 15 different temporal segments taken from the middle of the vowel and ranging from 4 to 60 msecs, then presented to 6 subjects with normal hearing. The mean temporal-segment recognition threshold of 15 msecs with a range from 9.3 msecs for the /u/ to 27.2 milliseconds for the /a/. Misidenti-fication of vowels was most often confused with the vowel sound adjacent to it on the vowel-hump diagram. There was no significant difference between the cardinal and noncardinal vowels.

The judgment of vowel quality.

Dialectology suffers from a lack of rigorously controlled techniques for recording vowel qualities. Instrumental investigation is often impracticable for the dialectologist An aural-imitative technique is here described, based on the cardinal vowel system. The degree of consistency achieved using this technique in a dialectological study is shown to compare favourably with that found in studies of the efficacy of the cardinal vowel system per se. No other dialectological study is known to have made such statistical observations on the reliability of its own statements about vowel quality. The value of two-dimensional vowel charts is also discussed.

Variability in Vowel Perception

It was hypothesised that linguists vary, within their own performance, in locating a given vowel-stimulus on a Daniel Jones Cardinal Vowel diagram, over even a short period of time. The hypothesis was successfully tested, using material synthesised on PAT, the Resonance Analogue Speech Synthesiser at Edinburgh University, and an indication is given of the nature and extent of variation of location of the given stimuli, over a period of a week. The results of the variation are used to evaluate the short- and long-term efficiency of the Daniel Jones Cardinal Vowel System of locating vowels.

Judgement of the Vowel Colour of Natural and Artificial Sounds

Five vowel sounds, each produced in five different ways, were presented to subjects with widely differing experience of tasks of this type for identification. The vowels were the last five of the standard set of eight cardinal vowels, and were presented to subjects with no experience of phonetics as belonging to the words bat, bart, bought, boat and boot. Each vowel was (a) spoken by a phonetician, (b) synthesized by adding individual harmonics in direct imitation of the spoken sounds, (c) represented by two pure tone components only, (d) synthesized by a talking machine (P.A.T.) and (e) imitated by selecting harmonics with a low-pass filter. All these sounds were categorised more or less “correctly” by skilled subjects; and, although there were wide and systematic differences in accuracy with untrained subjects, these performed consistently better than chance. The experiment showed (a) that the selection of harmonics according to formant theory is not the only, and perhaps not always the best means of synthesizing isolated vowels, (b) that even sounds which are poor representations of vowels can still be categorised with some consistency even by untrained subjects and (c) that a simple “percent correct” score is less sensitive than other measures.

Transmission of the Vocal Cavities

The transmission of the vocal cavities has been determined for eleven cardinal vowels of the I.P.A., using a hemilaryngectomized subject. A special throat loudspeaker with pick-up was constructed and was fitted in the throat of the subject, leaving a gap beneath it for normal breathing.

Study of One Factor in the Perception of the Unvoiced Stop Consonants

Work reported previously on synthetic speech produced from hand-drawn and highly schematized spectrograms has suggested an experimental test of the role of a single acoustic (spectrographic) variable in determining the identifiability of the voiceless stops p, t, and k. Schematized syllables consisting of a stop-like sound followed by a two-formant vowel were presented for identification of the consonant. The schematic stop consisted of a brief burst of tones confined to a narrow frequency range. The center frequency of this burst was varied in 12 equal steps from 360 to 4320 cps. Each schematic stop was paired with each of 7 two-formant cardinal vowels. The results show close agreement between subjects on the choice of certain frequency positions for p, t, and k; a systematic variation of this position from vowel to vowel; and, in certain cases, so marked an interdependence of the stop and vowel components of the schematic syllable that the same schematic stop was judged by a large majority of the subjects to be p when paired with i and u, but to be k when paired with a. Hence, it appears that the syllable rather than the phoneme may, at times, be the irreducible acoustic stimulus.

Proceedings of the Society of Radiographers

You will be asking yourselves the question: What relation can there possibly exist between Radiography and Pronunciation? It will help you to realise that radiography can be of very great service in speech, if I begin by showing you a slide. This radiogram, and indeed all the other radiograms that will be shown, were taken at the Institute of Anatomy, University College, by kind permission of Professor G. Elliot Smith, under the direction of Dr. H. A. Harris. The Radiographer was Mr. F. Melville. Fig. I shows the organs of speech in the act of pronouncing the long “ee” [i] of the word “seen.” To be more exact, perhaps I ought to say the vowel in the French word for bed, “lit,” or the German word for a song, “lied.” In the science of Phonetics the sound is given the name “cardinal vowel No. 1.”