14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Acoustic, Psychoacoustic, and Psychophysiological Measures of Distance in the Finnish Vowel Space

Mietta Lennes (1), Anne Lehtokoski (1), Paavo Alku (2), Risto Näätänen (1)

(1) University of Helsinki, Finland; (2) University of Turku, Finland

The aim of this study was to compare different vowel representations and distance measures by applying them on eighteen isolated semi-synthetic Finnish vowel stimuli. For spectral distance measures, the FFT power spectra and auditory spectra were calculated. Using different combinations of the vowel stimuli, the amplitudes of the mismatch negativity (MMN) event-related brain response were measured individually for four adult subjects to study the psychophysiological distances between Finnish vowels. A correlation was found between the Euclidean distances of both the FFT power spectra and the auditory spectra of the vowels in comparison to the corresponding MMN amplitudes. The results are important for comparative studies of the vowel spaces of different languages.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Lennes, Mietta / Lehtokoski, Anne / Alku, Paavo / Näätänen, Risto (1999): "Acoustic, psychoacoustic, and psychophysiological measures of distance in the Finnish vowel space", In ICPhS-14, 2465-2468.