Evaluating normalization accounts against the dense vowel space of Central Swedish.

ABSTRACT: Talkers vary in the phonetic realization of their vowels. One influential hypothesis holds that listeners overcome this inter-talker variability through pre-linguistic auditory mechanisms that normalize the acoustic or phonetic cues that form the input to speech recognition. Dozens of competing normalization accounts exist-including both accounts specific to vowel perception and general purpose accounts that can be applied to any type of cue. We add to the cross-linguistic literature on this matter by comparing normalization accounts against a new phonetically annotated vowel database of Swedish, a language with a particularly dense vowel inventory of 21 vowels differing in quality and quantity. We evaluate normalization accounts on how they differ in predicted consequences for perception.

SUBMITTER: Persson A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10322199 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature