Large-band integrated vowel representations
Marios Mantakas, Jean‐Luc Schwartz, Pierre Escudier · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1988
“Gross” vowel spectrum parameters for vowel classification are of interest to many researchers. In the present study, the “effective formant” F′2, estimated by the large-band spectral integration (LBI) model [Escudier et al., Acts of the French-Swedish Seminar, Grenoble, France (1985)], in the classification of natural French front vowels /i/ vs /y/ and /e/ vs /ø/(rounding opposition), is evaluated. In parallel, formants' measures on the same corpus are provided in order to compare with and interpret the results obtained using the LBI model Classification performance is good in the case of /i/-/y/. The optimal spectral integration window is 2–2.5 Bark large (cf. with the 3–3.5 Bark “critical distance”). The model fails, however, in the /e/-/ø/ classification. Here, the second formant's frequency is by far winning. The model's weakness apparently resides in its last stage, namely peak estimation. In fact, recent results show that the LBI spectral representation can support the definition of form factors (other than peak position) for the classification of vowels.