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Abstract

This paper makes three contributions to the discussion of vowel transformation in acoustic phonetics. First, it compares a selection of transformation routines, using three performance tests: Linear Discriminant Analysis of vowel categories, inter-speaker vowel space area homogenization, and inter-speaker vowel space overlap. Second, the complementary functions of psychoacoustic transformation and vowel-extrinsic normalization proper are discussed and demonstrated. And, third, multi-dimensional scaling is proposed as a tool that can be useful in the assessment of multi-dimensional (or multi-parametric) results common in the testing of different methodologies, but also in other experimental work.

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