Phonetics and Phonology of Speaking Styles: Reduction and Elaboration in Speech Communication Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain September 30 - October 2, 1991

Stability of Czech Vowels Studied in Three Different Corps

Marie Dohalská-Zichová

Institute of Phonetics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

Research in the sphere of sound speech perception and of speech signal intelligibility, above all, in unfavorable acoustic conditions points out an important role of vowels for a positive orientation in the usual communication.

During the studies of spontaneous contemporary spoken Czech we aimed at Czech vowel perception especially, to ascertain which vowels represent certain supporting points in the Czech vocalic system. The first material represented the experimental research in the field of the perception of segmental elements, especially vowels. After completing the confrontation study dealing with the perception of isolated vowels in "laboratory conditions", and then completing the contrastive research on the reliability of identification of vowels in logatoms, we wanted to find out what the perception of vowels in a natural context was.

On the basis of preliminary probes we saw fit to study the problem on three different sets:

• confrontation perception of isolated vowels starting from a laboratory material containing 12.000 data,
• perception of vowels in loggatoms - material acquired during the test of intelligibility of information for passengers at four different railway stations (the preliminary analysis, the result of which is presented here, included 20.000 data),
• intelligibility of vowels in authentic records of spontaneous communication in different kinds of communication in working and control processes.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Dohalská-Zichová, Marie (1991): "Stability of Czech vowels studied in three different corps", In PPoSpSt-1991, paper 020.