14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)

San Francisco, CA, USA
August 1-7, 1999

Perceptual F1-F2 Interaction in Quality Evaluation of Vowels Showing Formant Undershoot

Shinichi Tokuma

Department of English Language and Literature Sagami Women's University, Sagamihara, Kanagawa, Japan

This study aims at examining the results of the previous study, Tokuma[1], which suggest the potential sensitivity to the formant trajectory range of /CVC/ stimuli in the quality evaluation process of vowels showing formant undershoot. The matching paradigm used in Tokuma [1] is introduced, where listeners match constant /CVC/ stimuli of /dVd/ to variable /#V#/ stimuli, using a schematic on a PC screen, and the listeners change the F1/F2 frequency of /#V#/ by moving a mouse. However, in this study, the /dVd/ stimuli have an identical F2 trajectory peak/edge value but their F1 trajectories have six different peak values, producing six different constant /dVd/ types. The results of the experiment show that the effect of trajectory range on the vowel quality evaluation process cannot be explained in terms of the bias of the cursor position of the schematic grid, thus confirming the previous results. More interestingly, the results also suggest that low F1 values of /dVd/ could affect the F2 matching process by lowering it from the F2 /dVd/ trajectory peak, if the F1 is in a low frequency region.

Reference

  1. S. Tokuma, 1997. Quality of a vowel with formant undershoot: a preliminary perceptual study. In Proceedings of Eurospeech 97, Rhodes, Greece, September 1997, 4, 2163-2166.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Tokuma, Shinichi (1999): "Perceptual F1-F2 interaction in quality evaluation of vowels showing formant undershoot", In ICPhS-14, 195-198.