Formant Measurements of Complex Waves and Vowels Produced by Students

복합음과 대학생이 발음한 모음 포먼트 측정

Formant measurements are one of the most important factors to objectively test cross-linguistic differences among vowels produced by speakers of any given languages. However, many speech analysis softwares present erroneous estimates and some researchers use them without any verification procedures. The purposes of this paper are to examine formant measurements of complex waves which were synthesized from the average formant values of five Korean vowels using three default methods in Praat and to verify the measured values of the five vowels produced by 20 students using one of the methods. Variances along the time axis are discussed after determining absolute difference sum from the 1/3 vowel duration point. Results show that there were smaller measurement errors by the burg method. Also, greater errors were observed in the sl or lpc methods mostly caused by the inappropriate formant settings. Formant measurement deviations were greater in those vowels produced by the female students than those of the male students, which were mostly attributed to the settings for the vowels /o, u/. Formant settings can best be corrected by changing the number of formants to the number of visible dark bands on the spectrogram. Those results suggest that researchers should check the validity of the estimates from the speech analysis software. Further studies are recommended on the perception test of the original sound with the synthesized sound by the estimated formant values.