Listener sensitivity to formant amplitude variations in the perception of both within- and between-vowel-category differences was examined for two isolated synthetic vowels, /i/ and /ɪ/. The relative amplitudes of and were varied in steps along acoustic continua which were created in accord with formant amplitude patterns found in natural speech. The results showed that vowel-specific patterns of formant amplitude variation affected listeners’ judgments of “naturalness” of each vowel token, as well as its phonetic quality.
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© 2005 Acoustical Society of America.
2005
Acoustical Society of America