title: Cross-linguistic studies of children's and adults' vowel spaces.
abstract: This study examines cross-linguistic variation in the location of shared vowels in the vowel space across five languages (Cantonese, American English, Greek, Japanese, and Korean) and three age groups (2-year-olds, 5-year-olds, and adults). The vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/ were elicited in familiar words using a word repetition task. The productions of target words were recorded and transcribed by native speakers of each language. For correctly produced vowels, first and second formant frequencies were measured. In order to remove the effect of vocal tract size on these measurements, a normalization approach that calculates distance and angular displacement from the speaker centroid was adopted. Language-specific differences in the location of shared vowels in the formant values as well as the shape of the vowel spaces were observed for both adults and children.
authors.affiliation: Department of Communicative Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA. hyunju1@ualberta.ca
authors.forename: Hyunju
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Chung
authors.forename: Eun Jong
authors.initials: EJ
authors.lastname: Kong
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Edwards
authors.forename: Gary
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Weismer
authors.forename: Marios
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Fourakis
authors.forename: Youngdeok
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Hwang
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004739:England; D005260:Female; D006115:Greece; D006801:Humans; D007564:Japan; D007723:Korea; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology*