AUC Philologica (Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philologica) is an academic journal published by Charles University. It publishes scholarly articles in a large number of disciplines (English, German, Greek and Latin, Oriental, Romance and Slavonic studies, as well as in phonetics and translation studies), both on linguistic and on literary and cultural topics. Apart from articles it publishes reviews of new academic books or special issues of academic journals.
The journal is indexed in CEEOL, DOAJ, EBSCO, and ERIH PLUS.
AUC PHILOLOGICA, Vol 2022 No 1 (2022), 83–95
Intra- and inter-speaker variability of vowel space using three different formant extraction methods
Alžběta Houzar, Radek Skarnitzl
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/24646830.2022.30
published online: 17. 01. 2023
abstract
Individual speakers’ voices display various unique patterns, one of the most prominent of which is vowel articulation. This study focuses on vowel space properties of 15 Czech speakers in read and spontaneous speech, comparing outputs of three formant extraction methods, measuring formants: (1) in the vowels’ temporal midpoints, (2) as their mean from the vowels’ middle thirds, and (3) in the vowels’ articulatory targets. The results show extensive variability across speakers, but also great within-speaker variability between the two speech styles, with spontaneous speech manifesting more centralised vowel pronunciation than read utterances. The first two measurement methods did not yield systematically different results, while formant values extracted from acoustically defined articulatory targets lead to noticeably larger vowel spaces. The results suggest that care should be taken when interpreting formant values obtained by different methods.
keywords: vowel space area; vowel formants; intra-speaker variability; inter-speaker variability; Czech
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Intra- and inter-speaker variability of vowel space using three different formant extraction methods is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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ISSN: 0567-8269
E-ISSN: 2464-6830
