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PHONEMES MAY BE characterised in terms of the acoustic properties of
the vocal tract producing them. In most languages, the vowels are
well characterised in a graph whose axes are the frequencies of the two or
three lowest resonances. We study the acoustics of the vocal tract with a
non-invasive, real-time technique developed in this laboratory, which uses an acoustic current injected at the
speaker's lips. Measurements using this technique give us maps of the
produced phonemes of particular languages. We study perception of phonemes
using both physically and synthetically generated sounds and automated
testing procedures.
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n the resolution study, native speakers of the language studied are asked
to identify sounds which are either generated by vocal tracts with
known acoustic properties, or generated synthetically with known
signal properties. This study yields maps of the perceived phonemes. From
this study, we find that the chance of identifying an example sound as a particular vowel
decreases exponentially with its normalised displacement in phoneme space
from the mean position. This identifies a characteristic length for identification
or confusion in a particular language.
John Smith &
Joe Wolfe
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