• Volume/Page
  • Keyword
  • DOI
  • Citation
  • Advanced
   
 
 
 
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America / Volume 131 / Issue 2 / JASA EXPRESS LETTERS

Comparing vowel perception and production in Spanish and Portuguese: European versus Latin American dialects

J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Volume 131, Issue 2, pp. EL119-EL125 (2012); (7 pages)

Kateřina Chládková1 and Paola Escudero2

1Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 210, 1012 VT, The Netherlands k.chladkova@uva.nl
2MARCS Auditory Laboratories, Building 1 University of Western Sydney, Bullecourt Avenue, Milperra, NSW 2214, Australia paola.escudero@uws.edu.au

Full Text: Read Online (HTML) | Download PDF FREE | View Cart
Recent acoustic descriptions have shown that Spanish and Portuguese vowels are produced differently in Europe and Latin America. The present study investigates whether comparable between-variety differences exist in vowel perception. Spanish, Peruvian, Portuguese, and Brazilian listeners were tested in a vowel identification task with stimuli sampled from the whole vowel space. The mean perceived first (F1) and second formant (F2) of every vowel category were compared across varieties. For both languages, perception exhibited the same between-variety differences as production for F1 but not F2, which suggests correspondence between produced F1 and perceived vowel height but not between F2 and frontness.

© 2012 Acoustical Society of America

Article Outline

  1. Introduction
  2. Method
    1. Participants
    2. Stimuli
    3. Procedure
  3. Results
  4. Discussion

RELATED DATABASES

Web of Science

View this record in Web of Science

View Web of Science related articles

KEYWORDS and PACS

Keywords

speech, speech processing

PACS

  • 43.71.Es

    Vowel and consonant perception; perception of words, sentences, and fluent speech

  • 43.70.Mn

    Relations between speech production and perception

  • 43.71.An

    Models and theories of speech perception

ARTICLE DATA

History
Received 22 Sep 2011
Accepted 07 Dec 2011
Published online 17 Jan 2012
Digital Object Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.3674991

PUBLICATION DATA

ISSN

0001-4966 (print)  

Publisher

$abstract.society.value is a Member of CrossRef Acoustical Society of America

  1. Adank, P., Van Hout, R., and Smits, R. (2004). “An acoustic description of the vowels of Northern and Southern standard Dutch,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 116, 1729–1738JASMAN000126000003001379000001.
  2. Assmann, P. F., Nearey, T. M., and Hogan, J. T. (1982). “Vowel identification: orthographic, perceptual, and acoustic aspects,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 71, 975–89JASMAN000071000004000975000001. [ISI] [MEDLINE]
  3. Barbosa, P. A., and Albano, E. C. (2004). “Brazilian Portuguese,” J. Int. Phonet. Accos 34, 227–232.
  4. Boersma, P., and Chládková, K. (2011). “Asymmetries between speech perception and production reveal phonological structure,” Proceedings of the 17th ICPhS, pp. 328–331.
  5. Boersma, P., and Weenink, D. (2007). “PRAAT: doing phonetics by computer (Version 5.1.30) [computer program],” http://www.praat.org/, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam (Last viewed April 1, 2007).
  6. Chládková, K., Escudero, P., and Boersma, P. (2011). “Context-specific acoustic differences between Peruvian and Iberian Spanish vowels,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 130, 416–428.
  7. Costa, F. (2004). “Intrinsic prosodic properties of stressed vowels in European Portuguese,” Proceedings of Speech Prosody, pp. 53–56.
  8. Cruz-Ferreira, M. (1995). “European Portuguese,” J. Int. Phonet. Assoc. 25, 90–94.
  9. de Boer, B. (2011). “First formant difference for /i/ and /u/: A cross-linguistic study and an explanation,” J Phonetics 39, 110–114.
  10. Delgado-Martins, M. R. (1973). “Análise acústica das vogais orais tônicas em português (Acoustic analysis of the stressed oral vowels in Portuguese),” Boletim Filolog. (University of Lisbon) 22, 303–314.
  11. Disner, S. F. (1983). “Vowel quality: The relation between universal and language specific factors,” Ph.D. thesis, UCLA, Los Angeles, available at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/1wm9n05g (Last viewed April 27, 2011).
  12. Escudero, P., and Boersma, P. (2004). “Bridging the gap between L2 speech perception research and phonological theory,” Stud. Second Lang. Acquis. 26, 551–585.
  13. Escudero, P., Boersma, P., Rauber, A. S., and Bion, R. A. H. (2009). “A cross-dialect acoustic description of vowels: Brazilian and European Portuguese,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 126, 1379–1393.
  14. Evans, B., and Iverson, P. (2007). “Plasticity in vowel perception and production: A study of accent change in young adults,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 121, 3814–3826JASMAN000121000006003814000001. [MEDLINE]
  15. Fox, R. A. (1982). “Individual Variation in the Perception of Vowels: Implications for a Perception-Production Link,” Phonetica 39, 1–22. [ISI] [MEDLINE]
  16. Martínez-Celdrán, E., Fernández-Planas, A. M., and Carrera-Sabaté, J. (2003). “Castilian Spanish,” J. Int. Phonet. Assoc. 33, 255–259.
  17. Mendoza, E. (2003). “Temporal variability in speech segments of Spanish: Context and speaker related differences,” Speech Commun. 40, 431–447. [Inspec]
  18. Nearey, T. M. (1989). “Static, dynamic, and relational properties in vowel perception,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 85, 2088–2113JASMAN000085000005002088000001. [ISI] [MEDLINE]
  19. Perkell, J. S., Guenther, F. H., Lane, H., Matthies, M. L., Stockman, E., Tiede, M., and Zandipour, M. (2004). “The distinctness of speakers' productions of vowel contrasts is related to their discrimination of the contrasts,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 116, 2338–2344JASMAN000116000004002338000001. [ISI] [MEDLINE]
  20. Polka, L., and Bohn, O. S. (1996). “A cross-language comparison of vowel perception in English-learning and German-learning infants,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 100, 577–592JASMAN000100000001000577000001. [MEDLINE]
  21. Rauber, A. S., Escudero, P., Bion, R. A. H., and Baptista, B. O. (2005). “The interrelation between the perception and production of English vowels by native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese,” Proceedings of Interspeech, Lisbon, pp. 2913–2916.
  22. Savela, J. (2009). “Role of selected spectral attributes in the perception of synthetic vowels,” Ph.D. dissertation. University of Turku, Turku.
  23. Stevens, K. N. (1969). “Crosslanguage study of vowel perception,” Lang. Speech 12, 1–23.
  24. Strange, W., Bohn, O. S., Trent, S. A., and Nishi, K. (2004). “Acoustic and perceptual similarity of North German and American English vowels,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 115, 1791–1807.

Figures (2) Tables (1)

Figures (click on thumbnails to view enlargements)

FIG.1
F1 and F2 values of the 113 stimuli (axes are in Hz).

FIG.1 Download High Resolution Image (.zip file) | Export Figure to PowerPoint

FIG.2
Spanish (left) and Portuguese (right) vowel identification. Vowel symbols = F1 and F2 averaged across listeners; grey circles = PS or BP, white circles = ES or EP; ellipses = 1 s.d. Top panels = men, bottom = women. Axes are scaled in Mel with labels in Hz.

FIG.2 Download High Resolution Image (.zip file) | Export Figure to PowerPoint

Tables

Table I. Average F1 and F2 (in Hz) of the Spanish and Portuguese perceived vowels.

View Table


Close

Your Recent History Recent History Help

Recently Viewed

  1. Comparing vowel perception and production in Spanish and Portuguese: European versus Latin American dialects
  2. Evidence of cue use and performance differences in deciphering dysarthric speech
  3. The magnetic resonance imaging subset of the mngu0 articulatory corpus
  4. On the use of an absorption layer for the angular spectrum approach (L)
  5. A Hamiltonian method for finding broadband modal eigenvalues

Home Publications Meetings Contact ASA Site Map Back to Top

Copyright © Acoustical Society of America

close