Influence of Personal Characteristics of the Speaker on Phonetic Quality in Perception of Vowels

This study was designed to investigate the effect of speaker's voice quality on perceived phonetic quality in vowels using a perceptual scaling task. 16 subjects scaled sets of vowels produced by six different speakers (three women, three men). Analysis indicated no significant influence of speakers' quality on judgments of similarity of vowels. Results suggest that judgments of similarity were made on the basis of linguistically categorized images.