ITRW on Experimental Linguistics Athens, Greece August 28-30, 2006

Production and Perception of Greek Vowels in Normal and Cerebral Palsy Speech

Antonis Botinis (1), Marios Fourakis (2), John W. Hawks (3), Ioanna Orfanidou (1)

(1) Dept of Linguistics, University of Athens, Greece
(2) Dept of Communication Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

This study investigates the perceptual consequences and differences in vowel production between cerebral palsy (CP) afflicted Greek speakers and their normal counterparts. Formant (F1 and F2) values for the five vowels of Modern Greek were extracted from productions of both male and female speakers in stressed and unstressed conditions. These same productions were presented to normal hearing Greek speakers for vowel identification. Aggregate vowel spaces constructed from the mean F1 and F2 values reveal that the male CP speakers’ productions more closely resemble normal female spaces than that of normal males, but has only a slight impact on reducing intelligibility. Unstressed vowel productions from female CP speakers reduced intelligibility most significantly, in particular for the vowel [o]. Significantly greater standard errors around formant means for the CP speakers’ unstressed vowel productions suggest these speakers have considerably more difficulty in controlling vocal tract shape when using less vocal effort.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Botinis, Antonis / Fourakis, Marios / Hawks, John W. / Orfanidou, Ioanna (2006): "Production and perception of greek vowels in normal and cerebral palsy speech", In ExLing-2006, 89-92.