engleski

Electropalatographic analysis of vowels in quasi-spontaneous speech

Instrumental data on speech production physiology are crucial for our understanding of articulatory processes. However, instrumental physiological techniques, such as electropalatography (EPG), are mostly limited to laboratories and the so called laboratory speech is often described as different from spontaneous speech. It is therefore quite challenging to use instrumental physiological techniques for spontaneous speech recording and analysis. Particularly demanding for instrumental physiological analysis in both laboratory and spontaneous speech are vowels. The aim of this investigation is to explore the possibilities of using EPG to quantify three Croatian corner vowels on the vertical (high- low) and horizontal (front-back) axis of the vowel chart, which is comparable to the vowel chart based on acoustic data (F1, F2), in quasi-spontaneous speech. Data were extracted from the R-kor corpus of Croatian speech containing simultaneous acoustic and EPG data. Speech material from eight female speakers of Standard Croatian with no speech or hearing impairments was utilised. A dialogue situation was set up in the form of a map description exercise. Stressed vowels (/i, a, u/) were analysed in twosyllable CVCV words. New measures were proposed to quantify the vertical and the horizontal position of vowels in the vowel triangle. The results showed that the OC (open-closed) and the FB (front-back) measures successfully and significantly separated the three corner vowels along the vertical and the horizontal dimensions of the vowel triangle.

quasi-spontaneous speech, electropalatography (EPG), vowels, EPG indices, Croatian

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