An Experiment in Automatic Isolation and Identification of Vowels in Continuous Speech

Results of a vowel isolation and identification experiment provided tentative answers to some acoustic phonetic questions concerning continuous speech. The experiment indicated that (1) automatic techniques can be employed to isolate vowels in the speech signal; (2) vowels consistently reach an approximate target in terms of their first three formants; (3) it is possible to locate a “steady-state” portion of the vowel that corresponds closely to the vowel target; (4) a single spectrum extracted in the steady-state region of the vowel locates that vowel reliably with respect to the three-dimensional formant space; and (5) comparison of the vowel formants with a previously compiled, speaker-dependent table of vowel formants provides a satisfactory method of identifying the vowel.