Weighted vowel prototypes in Finnish and German

Area of Science:

• Phonetics and Phonology
• Acoustic Phonetics
• Psychoacoustics

Background:

• Vowel perception and production are key to understanding phonological systems.
• Cross-linguistic comparisons reveal universal and language-specific phonetic patterns.
• Prototypicality measures offer insights into the internal structure of vowel categories.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the perceptual vowel space of Finnish and German languages.
• To compare the internal structure of vowel categories using three prototypicality measures.
• To analyze inter-subject variability and differences between perceptual and production data.

Main Methods:

• Utilized three prototypicality measures: centroid (Pc), absolute prototype (Pa), and weighted prototype (Pω).
• Analyzed F1 and F2 formant frequencies to describe vowel category structures.
• Calculated Euclidean distances in Pω to compare Finnish and German vowel systems.

Main Results:

• Weighted prototypes (Pω) exhibited the smallest inter-subject differences, comparable to the Difference Limen (DL) for F1-F2 frequencies.
• Absolute prototypes (Pa) and weighted prototypes (Pω) significantly differed from the centroid (Pc).
• Finnish and German vowel systems showed high similarity (7-34 mels in Pω), with minor variations in /e/, /ø/, and /u/.

Conclusions:

• The weighted prototype (Pω) is a robust measure for characterizing perceptual vowel spaces with low inter-subject variability.
• Finnish and German perceptual vowel spaces are largely similar, supporting shared phonetic principles.
• Perceptual prototypes show a consistent divergence from previously published production data.