Examining Vowels' Formant Frequency Shifts Caused by Preceding Consonants for Turkish Language

Year 2018, Volume: 2 Issue: 2, 38 - 47, 28.12.2018

Yunus Korkmaz Aytuğ Boyacı

Abstract

Formant frequency of vowels in a language is
considered as one of the important acoustical parameter of speech signal. This
parameter can be seen as acoustic resonance of human vocal tract. Although
formant frequencies which is changeable across genders, age, and languages have
been studied for various purposes by many researchers in some languages,
alteration effects of stop consonants on adjacent vowels hasn’t been worked yet
for Turkish language. In this study, formant frequency values (F1, F2 and F3)
of eight isolated vowels (/a/, /e/, /ı/, /i/, /o/, /ö/, /u/, /ü/) have been
compared to formant frequency values of vowels that come after any stop
consonant (/p/, /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/, /g/) to detect any changes caused by stop
consonants in formant frequencies. Totally 48 meaningful Turkish syllables
(combinations of all stop consonants and all vowels) and 8 isolated vowels have
been uttered by 10 male speakers three times repeatedly for each unit. At the
end of this study, the plosive stop consonants /p/ and /g/ among others have
been found as the ones having most alteration effects on F1 value of adjacent
vowel /a/ in a CVC-context syllable. F2 of isolated vowel /a/ has been shifted
up with /k/ and /g/ visibly. Also, F3 of /a/ has been shifted down by
approximately 150 Hz with the same plossive stop consonants /k/ and /g/. These
findings can help researchers studying on formant frequencies of vowels in
Turkish language in order to specify right syllables to deal with.

Keywords

Speech Processing, Formant Frequency Shifts, Vowels, Plossive Stop Consonants, Turkish Language

References

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