SPECTRAL AND TEMPORAL-DOMAIN QUESTIONS FOR AN AUDITORY MODEL OF VOWEL PERCEPTION
RAW BLADON, B LINDBLOM · 2024
Drawing on the work of Zwicker (e.g.Zwicker and Feldtkeller 1967), recently formalized by Schroeder, Atal and Hall (1979), we have elaborated a specific version of a theory of peripheral auditory representation of 5teady=state vowels (Bladon and Lindblom 1979).This model, together with a distance metric which follows Plomp (1970).has been tested by hypothesizing that listeners in vowel-matching tasks of a natural or experimental nature make their judgements of vowel distance in accordance with the model.Very largely. it seems they do.and this is an encouraging result.Possibly more interesting.though.are the two residual cases from our experiments where the model does not predict the auditory distance correctly.It is in search of an explanation for these irregularities in the data that we pose some questions here which would permit some fine-tuning of the model.either in respect of its amplitude-spectrum characteristics.or in respect of the effect of temporal processing on perceived vowel quality.These questions are raised without as yet fully knowing the answers.but with the hope that a preliminary airing of them may narrow down the choice of priorities for the next stage of our research.