Stockholm university
Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism

New doctoral thesis: Comparing theories of pre-linguistic normalization for vowel perception

Anna Persson defended her doctoral thesis in Scandinavian Languages in 2024: Comparing theories of pre-linguistic normalization for vowel perception. Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism at Stockholm University.

Anna Persson.
Anna Persson. Photo: Pia Nordin

The present thesis compares competing theories of pre-linguistic normalization for the perception of Swedish and English vowels. Specifically, the overall aim is to investigate whether normalization might be key to understanding the mechanisms supporting robust cross-talker perception, and to gain more insights into the specific computations involved. The thesis is based on three articles that employ acoustic analysis, behavioral experiments and computational modeling to address the question of vowel normalization.

Cover disseration: Dark blue olive branch on white background

Article I uses a novel phonetically annotated database of Swedish vowel recordings, the SwehVd, to provide an updated acoustic description of the Central Swedish vowel system and to evaluate certain claims of cue-to-category mappings introduced by previous work. Replicating previous studies, the results of Article I suggest that F1, F2 and vowel duration are the most important cues to vowel identity in Central Swedish. In addition, the results highlight the importance of formant dynamics for reliable category distinctions. The acoustic characteristics of Article I further constitute the input to the computational modeling presented in Article II.

Fulltext in Publication database DiVA: Comparing theories of pre-linguistic normalization for vowel perception

Anna Persson

Opponent was Professor Timo Roettger, University of Oslo, Norway.

Theme
Language, Literature and Culture - Theme page
Research subject
Swedish as a second language
Research project
L1 talkers’ adaptation to L2 speech

L1 talkers’ adaptation to L2 speech. Computational and experimental approaches to vowel perception. This project investigates how the speech perception system deals with the fact that we all differ in our pronunciation.

Research

Last updated: January 13, 2025

Source: Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism

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