| Abstrakt: |
In continuation of an experiment described previously [D. Terbeek and R. Harshman, J. Acoust. Soc. Amer. 50, 147(A) (1971)], judgments of perceptual similarity and difference for 12 natural vowel sounds were obtained from native speakers of Turkish and Swedish. These new data, like the earlier data from English, Thai, and German subjects, were analyzed using the PARAFAC multimode factor analysis method [R. Harshman, UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics No. 16 (1970)]. The resulting perceptual spaces are roughly interpretable in terms of traditional vowel descriptions, but certain difficulties remain. The results for the five languages tested, together with results reported by other investigators, were subjected to several further types of analysis. The patterns which emerge suggest that the function relating perceived distances between vowels to their positions along underlying perceptual dimensions is non-Euclidean in two ways. First, the perceptual dimensions do not lie orthogonally to one another, implying that they are related in meaning. Second, they interact nonlinearly, producing a curved space, an effect which causes the extraction of an uninterpretable dimension when linear models are used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
