Individual Variation in the Perception of Vowels: Implications for a Perception-Production Link

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Abstract
A scaling experiment using dyadic comparisons of vowel pairs was performed to determine if significant perceptual variation existed on an individual level and whether such variation could be correlated with differences among subjects in their production of vowels. Subjects were required to scale six separate sets of vowel stimuli. Each stimulus set consisted of the 36 possible dyads from the vowel set /i, I, ε, æ, a, Λ, o, Æ, u/. Analysis of the resulting data indicated that significant individual perceptual variation was present which could be seen as a function of perceptual structure differences between the subjects and not merely error variance. In addition, such variations were related to aspects of each subject’s acoustic vowel space – indicators of tongue height and advancement during vowel articulation. These results were interpreted as suggesting a link between perception and production.