VOWEL CLASSIFICATION IN CHILDREN

Research into the developing vowel system has assumed greater importan ce in recent years with growing evidence for a more important theoreti cal role for vowels in child phonology. One limitation of acoustic stu dies in child speech has been the practical difficulties associated wi th formant-based analysis and the experiments reported in this paper c ompare the reliability of critical bands and formant frequencies as ac oustic correlates of vowel identity in children. Gaussian classificati on of vowels in /CVd/ Australian English words was carried out using d ata collected from 4-year-old children and male and female adults. The results show that the use of critical bands for the classification of vowels in children is a robust technique which requires less experime nter intervention in the analysis procedure than the use of formant fr equencies, while achieving similar results. The ability to utilize an automatic methodology such as critical band analysis can provide a ver y powerful tool for large-scale studies in this area. (C) 1996 Acousti cal Society of America.