IMPACT OF DURATION AND VOWEL INVENTORY SIZE ON<br />FORMANT VALUES OF ORAL VOWELS: AN AUTOMATED<br />FORMANT ANALYSIS FROM EIGHT LANGUAGES.

International audienceEight languages (Arabic, English, French, German,<br />Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish)<br />with 6 differently sized vowel inventories were<br />analysed in terms of vowel formants. A tendency<br />to phonetic reduction for vowels of short acoustic<br />durations clearly emerges for all languages. The<br />data did not provide evidence for an effect of<br />inventory size on the global acoustic space and<br />only the acoustic stability of quantal vowel /i/ is<br />greater than that of other vowels in many cases.<br />Keywords: vowel formants, adaptive dispersion,<br />reduction, quantal theory