Department of Communicative Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2012 Jan;131(1):442-54. doi: 10.1121/1.3651823.
This study examines cross-linguistic variation in the location of shared vowels in the vowel space across five languages (Cantonese, American English, Greek, Japanese, and Korean) and three age groups (2-year-olds, 5-year-olds, and adults). The vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/ were elicited in familiar words using a word repetition task. The productions of target words were recorded and transcribed by native speakers of each language. For correctly produced vowels, first and second formant frequencies were measured. In order to remove the effect of vocal tract size on these measurements, a normalization approach that calculates distance and angular displacement from the speaker centroid was adopted. Language-specific differences in the location of shared vowels in the formant values as well as the shape of the vowel spaces were observed for both adults and children.
本研究考察了五种语言（粤语、美式英语、希腊语、日语和韩语）和三个年龄组（2 岁、5 岁和成年人）中元音空间中共享元音位置的跨语言变化。使用单词重复任务在熟悉的单词中引出元音 /a/、/i/ 和 /u/。目标单词的发音由每种语言的母语人士录制和转录。对于正确发出的元音，测量第一和第二共振峰频率。为了消除声道大小对这些测量的影响，采用了一种从说话人质心计算距离和角度位移的归一化方法。无论是成年人还是儿童，在共振峰值以及元音空间的形状方面，都观察到了共享元音位置的语言特异性差异。
