PHONEME CATEGORIZATION OF SYNTHETIC VOCALIC STIMULI BY SPEAKERS OF JAPANESE, SPANISH, PERSIAN, AND AMERICAN ENGLISH.

The article discusses the phoneme categorization of various languages on the basis of 69 synthetic vowels generated by researchers. For this purpose, speakers from four language groups including American English, Spanish, Japanese and Persian listened to the synthetic vowels and assigned a vowel phoneme from their language or a class of sound not represented in their language. The experiment shows that the subjects were ready for synthetic sounds as they could assign many of them to phonemes. The study showed how to establish phoneme patterns and classify languages their basis which is known as politicization. It is also suggested that the same process could also be used for consonantal phonemes as well in a more complex form.