Comparison of three performance measures obtained with perceptually balanced vowel continua
Blas Espinoza-Varas · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1983
The auditory representation of formant frequency appears to be consistent with a scale of critical-band units: the bark scale [Schroeder et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 66, 1647–1652 (1979)]. This paper compares measures of identification, discrimination, and perceptual distance obtained in vowel continua divided into “perceptually equal” steps; i.e., equal steps along the bark scale. The continua ranged from either /u/ to /i/ or from /ɔ/ to /ɛ/. The 400-ms, steady-state vowels were generated using a three-formant parallel synthesizer. Within each continua, the frequencies of F1 and F3 were fixed, while the frequency difference F2 − F1 (or F3 − F2) varied from ≈0.5 to ≈7.0 bark in steps of ≈0.5 bark. The fundamental frequency was 120 Hz. Listeners were asked to identify each of the stimuli in the continua and to make a “vowel-goodness” rating. The results are discussed in the context of the question of whether the bark scale is consistent with all three performance measures [Supported by AHFMR and NSERC.]