Acoustic characteristics of Greek vowels produced by adults and children

Abstract

To my knowledge, no research on the acoustic analysis of Greek children's speech has been published. At the same time, the need for an expanded knowl­edge base, which would include information on children, is underlined in the lit­erature (Deterding 1990, Kent and Read 1992, Clark and Yallop 1995, Henton 1995, Lass 1996, Lee et al. 1997). In response to this need, this study involves the acoustic analysis of Greek men's, women's and children's vowels —with an em­phasis on the last— and examines the relationship between adults' and chil­dren's acoustic data. Children's vowels are found to show higher formant fre­quencies than adults', as expected from English children's data, and the scat- tergrams of adults-versus-children's data reveal a relation that can be repre­sented by a linear model quite satisfactorily.