Bradlow A R
Cornell University, Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Ithaca, New York 14853.
J Acoust Soc Am. 1995 Mar;97(3):1916-24. doi: 10.1121/1.412064.
Languages differ widely in the size of their vowel inventories; however, cross-linguistic surveys indicate that certain vowels and vowel system configurations are preferred. A cross-linguistic comparison of the acoustic vowel categories of two languages that differ in vowel inventory size, namely, English and Spanish, was performed in order to reveal some of the language-specific and/or universal principles that determine the acoustic realization of the vowels of these two languages. This comparison shows that the precise location in the acoustic space of similar vowel categories across the two languages is determined, in part, by a language-specific base-of-articulation property. These data also suggest that the relatively crowded acoustic vowel space of English may be expanded with respect to the relatively uncrowded acoustic vowel space of Spanish; however, this effect is variable depending on the syllable context of the English vowels. Finally, the data indicate no difference in the tightness of within-category clustering for the large versus the small vowel inventory.
不同语言的元音系统在规模上存在很大差异；然而，跨语言调查表明，某些元音和元音系统配置更受青睐。为了揭示一些决定这两种语言元音声学实现的特定语言和/或普遍原则，对元音系统规模不同的两种语言——英语和西班牙语的声学元音类别进行了跨语言比较。这种比较表明，两种语言中相似元音类别的声学空间精确位置部分由特定语言的发音基础属性决定。这些数据还表明，相对于西班牙语相对宽松的声学元音空间，英语相对拥挤的声学元音空间可能会扩大；然而，这种影响因英语元音的音节语境而异。最后，数据表明元音系统规模大的类别内聚类紧密程度与规模小的并无差异。
