What’s in a Schwa?
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Florien J. Koopmans-van Beinum
Abstract
Although the schwa sound is by far the most frequent vowel in Dutch, it has up to now been phonetically the most neglected. We used an existing database of vowel sounds from focus words in spontaneous speech and in lexically the same text, read aloud by one male speaker, to analyse durational and spectral characteristics of schwas, and we compared the results with data on schwa diphones used in Dutch text-to-speech synthesis. It turned out that, contrary to what is usually thought, lexical schwa sounds in natural continuous speech are considerably shorter than other short vowels, that there is no strong consonantal influence on schwa duration, that schwa sounds display a spectral spread larger than any other vowel, and that surrounding consonants seem to play a role with respect to the midpoint formant distribution of the schwa within the whole vowel system. In no way can the schwa be considered as the ‘bench-mark’ of a speaker’s vowel system.
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© 1994 S. Karger AG, Basel
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Special Section
- Contents, Vol. 51, No.1-3, 1991
- Paper
- Editors’ Introduction
- ‘Speaker’ and ‘Speech’ Characteristics: A Deductive Approach
- From EMG to Formant Patterns of Vowels: The Implication of Vowel Spaces
- Individual Variation in Measures of Voice
- Glottal Stops and Glottalization in German
- Tongue Body Kinematics in Velar Stop Production: Influences of Consonant Voicing and Vowel Context
- What’s in a Schwa?
- Durational Correlates of Quantity in Swedish, Finnish and Estonian: Cross-Language Evidence for a Theory of Adaptive Dispersion
- Evidence for the Adaptive Nature of Speech on the Phrase Level and Below
- Some Distributional Facts about Fricatives and a Perceptual Explanation
- Listeners’ Normalization of Vowel Quality Is Influenced by ‘Restored’ Consonantal Context
- The Phonological Reality of Locus Equations across Manner Class Distinctions: Preliminary Observations
- Musical Significance of Musicians’ Syllable Choice in Improvised Nonsense Text Singing: A Preliminary Study
- Cross-Language Differences in Phonological Acquisition: Swedish and American /t/
- The Nature and Origins of Ambient Language Influence on Infant Vocal Production and Early Words
- Conventional, Biological and Environmental Factors in Speech Communication: A Modulation Theory
- Prolegomena to a Theory of the Sound Pattern of the First Spoken Language
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Special Section
- Contents, Vol. 51, No.1-3, 1991
- Paper
- Editors’ Introduction
- ‘Speaker’ and ‘Speech’ Characteristics: A Deductive Approach
- From EMG to Formant Patterns of Vowels: The Implication of Vowel Spaces
- Individual Variation in Measures of Voice
- Glottal Stops and Glottalization in German
- Tongue Body Kinematics in Velar Stop Production: Influences of Consonant Voicing and Vowel Context
- What’s in a Schwa?
- Durational Correlates of Quantity in Swedish, Finnish and Estonian: Cross-Language Evidence for a Theory of Adaptive Dispersion
- Evidence for the Adaptive Nature of Speech on the Phrase Level and Below
- Some Distributional Facts about Fricatives and a Perceptual Explanation
- Listeners’ Normalization of Vowel Quality Is Influenced by ‘Restored’ Consonantal Context
- The Phonological Reality of Locus Equations across Manner Class Distinctions: Preliminary Observations
- Musical Significance of Musicians’ Syllable Choice in Improvised Nonsense Text Singing: A Preliminary Study
- Cross-Language Differences in Phonological Acquisition: Swedish and American /t/
- The Nature and Origins of Ambient Language Influence on Infant Vocal Production and Early Words
- Conventional, Biological and Environmental Factors in Speech Communication: A Modulation Theory
- Prolegomena to a Theory of the Sound Pattern of the First Spoken Language
