Information Conveyed by Vowels

TLDR

Speech sounds convey linguistic, socio‑linguistic, and personal information, enabling listeners to identify words, appreciate speaker background, and recognize the speaker. The study explores psychological implications and proposes hypotheses on how vowels convey all three information types. Researchers synthesized six versions of the sentence “Please say what this word is” on a parametric artificial talking device and four b‑(vowel)‑t test words. Results show that vowel linguistic information depends on relative formant relationships with other vowels, and that test word identification is influenced by the introductory sentence’s formant structure.

Abstract

Most speech sounds may be said to convey three kinds of information: linguistic information which enables the listener to identify the words that are being used; socio-linguistic information, which enables him to appreciate something about the background of the speaker; and personal information which helps to identify the speaker. An experiment has been carried out which shows that the linguistic information conveyed by a vowel sound does not depend on the absolute values of its formant frequencies, but on the relationship between the formant frequencies for that vowel and the formant frequencies of other vowels pronounced by that speaker. Six versions of the sentence Please say what this word is were synthesized on a Parametric Artificial Talking device. Four test words of the form b-(vowel)-t were also synthesized. It is shown that the identification of the test word depends on the formant structure of the introductory sentence. Some psychological implications of this experiment are discussed, and hypotheses are put forward concerning the ways in which all three kinds of information are conveyed by vowels.