A cross-language study of vowel spaces and interference
Allard Jongman, Marios S. Fourakis · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1987
This is a study of the spectral characteristics of the vowels of German and modern Greek in relation to those of American English. Two native speakers of German produced 18 words containing the short and long vowels of German, and two native speakers of Greek produced five words containing the five pure vowels of Greek. All speakers also produced nine English words containing the nine simple vowels of English. Vowel target zones for German, Greek, and foreign-accented English are established within the auditory perceptual theory [J. D. Miller, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 76, S79 (1984)] and compared to the target zones of native speakers of English. A metric of the distance between the foreign, foreign-accented English, and native English target zones will be developed. Perception experiments are planned to obtain both identification scores and paired-comparison ratings of foreign accentedness. The positions of vowels in both the native and acquired language will be correlated with these ratings to determine if an objective measure of foreign accent and phonetic interference can be derived.