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An Assessment Of Acoustic Contrast Between Long And Short Vowels Using Convex Hulls, Erin F. Haynes, Michael Taylor

Mechanical Engineering

An alternative to the spectral overlap assessment metric (SOAM), first introduced by Wassink [(2006). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 119(4), 2334–2350], is introduced. The SOAM quantifies the intra- and inter-language differences between long–short vowel pairs through a comparison of spectral (F1, F2) and temporal properties modeled with best fit ellipses (F1 × F2 space) and ellipsoids (F1 × F2 × duration). However, the SOAM ellipses and ellipsoids rely on a Gaussian distribution of vowel data and a dense dataset, neither of which can be assumed in endangered languages or languages with limited available data. The method presented in this paper, called …