On the acoustical characterization of vowels
Maxine Eskénazi, Jean-Sylvain Liénard · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1983
Since the work OF Ladefoged and Broadbent [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 29, 98–104 (1957)], it is generally accepted that the identification of a specific vowel is linked to the relation of all of the vowels in a language. The type of acoustical characterization chosen for the vowels of a given language, and the result obtained in its use, depend in part on the quantity of phonetically different vowels in that language. A substantial database has been constituted, including several tokens for each of 13 French vowels pronounced by 30 male and female speakers, in order to study the acoustical features of vowels. Results of antomatic recognition tests based on a statistical characterization of smoothed, amplitude-independent spectra [Eskenazi and Lienard, GALF-AFCET Seminar, Toulouse, Sept. 81, pp. 54–69] are compared to the results of perceptual recognition experiments on the same data, and discussed in light of some other vowel identification experiments [Komatsu et al., IEEE-ICASSP Paris, May 82; Cole et al., Artificial Intelligence Conf., Pittsburgh, Aug. 82; Caelen and Caelen, GALF-AFCET Seminar, Toulouse, Sept. 81, pp. 129–143].