Acoustic characteristics of clearly spoken English tense and lax vowels

Abstract

Clearly produced vowels exhibit longer duration and more extreme spectral properties than plain, conversational vowels. These features also characterize tense relative to lax vowels. This study explored the interaction of clear-speech and tensity effects by comparing clear and plain productions of three English tense–lax vowel pairs (/i-ɪ/, /ɑ-ʌ/, /u-ʊ/ in /kVd/ words). Both temporal and spectral acoustic features were examined, including vowel duration, vowel-to-word duration ratio, formant frequency, and dynamic spectral characteristics. Results revealed that the tense−lax vowel difference was generally enhanced in clear relative to plain speech, but clear-speech modifications for tense and lax vowels showed a trade-off in the use of temporal and spectral cues. While plain-to-clear vowel lengthening was greater for tense than lax vowels, clear-speech modifications in spectral change were larger for lax than tense vowels. Moreover, peripheral tense vowels showed more consistent clear-speech modifications in the temporal than spectral domain. Presumably, articulatory constraints limit the spectral variation of these extreme vowels, so clear-speech modifications resort to temporal features and reserve the primary spectral features for tensity contrasts. These findings suggest that clear-speech and tensity interactions involve compensatory modifications in different acoustic domains.