15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003

Influences on Infant Vowel Acoustics

Rory A. DePaolis (1), Marilyn M. Vihman (2)

(1) James Madison University, USA
(2) University of Wales, UK

An investigation into the intrinsic acoustic characteristics of infants' vowels was undertaken. The fundamental frequency and duration of the first vowel of CVCV utterances was measured for American, French, and Welsh infants. The American and French infants' F0 was dependent upon vowel height: the higher the vowel height the higher the F0. The Welsh infants F0 did not exhibit the same pattern. Welsh low vowels were higher in F0 than both the mid and high vowels. All three language groups did produce longer tense than lax vowels although the extent of the difference was greater for the American (31ms) than for the French (10ms) or the Welsh (6ms).

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  DePaolis, Rory A. / Vihman, Marilyn M. (2003): "Influences on infant vowel acoustics", In ICPhS-15, 1029-1032.