Cross-Language Differences in the Perception of Natural Vowel Sounds
Dale Terbeek, Richard A. Harshman · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1971
Recent studies of perceptual vowel spaces deal strictly with steady-state stimuli. In most cases, these stimuli were acoustically similar to vowels in the listeners' native languages. In this experiment, listeners from different native language backgrounds performed triadic comparisons on 12 natural vowel stimuli, produced with falling intonation and stress in the context [bəb__] in order to place listeners in a speech-perception mode. Also, for any listener, the stimulus set included vowels not present in his native language. The stimuli were presented under listener control by a PDP-12 computer. Listeners' judgments were converted to relative difference matrices, supplied with additive constants according to Cooper's best-fit technique, and transformed into scalar products of vectors. The resulting data were factor analyzed by the multimodal PARAFAC procedure (Harshman, this meeting), which provides highly constrained solutions of more theoretical interest than are provided by traditional multidimensional scaling. Factor solutions for 1 through 5 factors were obtained and compared. Results across listeners grouped according to native language have implications for the concept of a “universal” perceptual space.