The vowel inherent spectral change of English vowels spoken by native and non-native speakers

Abstract

The current study examined Vowel Inherent Spectral Change (VISC) of English vowels spoken by English-, Chinese-, and Korean-native speakers. Two metrics, spectral distance (amount of spectral shift) and spectral angle (direction of spectral shift) of formant movement from the onset to the offset, were measured for 12 English monophthongs produced in a /hvd/ context. While Chinese speakers showed significantly greater spectral distances of vowels than English and Korean speakers, there was no significant speakers' native language effect on spectral angles. Comparisons to their native vowels for Chinese and Korean speakers suggest that VISC might be affected by language-specific phonological structure.