Acoustic characteristics of Croatian cardinal vowel formants (F1, F2 and F3)

In the forensic context formant values (F1, F2 and F3) are measured in speech. Previous Croatian research measured formants in nonsense words or in several phonemes ; therefore the aim of this paper was to determine standard values for General Croatian Pronunciation for male and female speakers in words. Pharyngeal resonance and resonance in the back part of oral cavity is the most important for F1 values and the highest F1 value was found for vowel [a] ; the front/back position of vowel influences F2 values ; the most fronted vowel in Croatian is [i] and it has the highest average F2 value. Due to the contractions in those areas vowel [i] has the lowest values while the most resonant vowel [a] has the highest values. F3 values are important for comparisons of various vowel pronunciations since F3 does not distort in telephone transmission or shows fewer distortions than F1 for most vowels.