Perceptual differences between vowels located in a limited phonetic space

Abstract

The perception of subphonemic differences between vowels was investigated using multidimensional scaling techniques. Three experiments were conducted with natural-sounding synthetic stimuli generated by linear predictive coding (LPC) formant synthesizers. In the first experiment, vowel sets near the pairs /i–i/, /q–æ/, or /u–u/ were synthesized containing 11 vowels each. Listeners judged the dissimilarities between all pairs of vowels within a set several times. These perceptual differences were mapped into distances between the vowels in an n-dimensional space using two-way multidimensional scaling. Results for each vowel set showed that the physical stimulus space, which was specified by the two parameters F1 and F2, was always mapped into a two-dimensional perceptual space. The best metric for modeling the perceptual distances was the Euclidean distance between F1 and F2 in barks. The second experiment investigated the perception of the same vowels from the first experiment, but embedded in a consonantal context. Following the same procedures as experiment 1, listeners’ perception of the /bv/ dissimilarities was not different from their perception of the isolated vowel dissimilarities. The third experiment investigated dissimilarity judgments for the three vowels /æ–a–v/ located symmetrically in the F1×F2 vowel space. While the perceptual space was again two dimensional, the influence of phonetic identity on vowel difference judgments was observed. Implications for determining metrics for subphonemic vowel differences using multidimensional scaling are discussed.