Cross-linguistic studies of children's and adults' vowel spacesa

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Vol. 131; no. 1; pp. 442 - 454
• Main Authors: CHUNG, Hyunju, EUN JONG KONG, EDWARDS, Jan, WEISMER, Gary, FOURAKIS, Marios, HWANG, Youngdeok
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Melville, NY Acoustical Society of America 2012; American Institute of Physics
• Subjects: Biological and medical sciences; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Language; Production and perception of spoken language; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Speech Production; Human; Adult; Cross linguistic study; Verbal production; Child
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• 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.