ABSTRACT

This chapter will review literature on the acoustics and perception of vowels, with a nearly exclusive focus on the vowels North American English. The chapter will begin with a brief review of source-filter theory as it relates to vowel production, and a description of the acoustic properties of North American English vowels. This will be followed by a discussion of research in the four most heavily studies areas related to vowel perception: (a) the very basic question of whether vowel perception is driven by formants, the overall shape of the spectrum envelope, or some other type of representation; (b) the role of spectral change in vowel identification; (c) the role of duration in vowel identification; and (d) long-standing questions about talker normalization (i.e., questions about the mechanisms that are used by listeners to accommodate the acoustic differences that are observed when the same vowel type is spoken by different talkers).