Vowel system and Peterson

The Vowel System Article

The papers Vowel system and Peterson and Barney analyze the identification of changes in vowel utterances. In the two papers, vocalic segments from naturally occurring utterances are transcribed to study oral language and the calibration of recording when vowel systems are monitored. However, the research in the Vowel System article focuses on the oral language development of deaf children who have received multichannel cochlear implants prior to the age of two. The investigation in this article’s research aims to ascertain whether recipients of young cochlear implants typically perform better than those who received them after age two. This article was important because it outlined a study carried out to confirm if latter research that showed that the development of oral language on deaf children who receive early implantation might reduce the negative results of auditory deprivation by offering acoustic input during a time when the tasks of the auditory cortex are being established. The study also wanted to analyze if the NIH agreement panel was right by proposing the implantation before 24 months since they may promote the efficient acquisition of language and speech.

The Peterson and Barney Article

In Peterson and Barney article, the study was carried out to determine whether speech production depends upon the experience of an individual and complexity. In this case, the study was to analyze if the effect of human behavior of self-correcting as a speaker hers his/her voice and adjusts his/her mechanisms. In consonant-vowel-consonant structure, a speaker’s intonation of the vowel within a word will be subjective to one’s specific dialectal background. A person pronunciation of the vowel may vary both in phonetic excellence and in quantifiable characteristic from those produced in the term by speakers with other upbringings. Similarly, a listener is affected by his/her identification of a sound by his/her previous experience. According to the article, these variations differences are observed when an individual is requested to make repeated utterances of the same phoneme (Peterson, Gordon, and Barney, 2).

The Vowel System Study Participant

The participant of the vowel system study is a 19 months old deaf child who received a cochlear implant. The development of Hannah’s vowel system was observed by recording vocalic segments from impulsive utterances made during two 30-minute recording sessions before implant surgery and after the initiation of implants the 12 monthly recording were also used. The transcribers independently decided to include vowel types in her inventory every time a vocalization had an allophone of a specified vowel type (Ertmer, 6). Before Hannah received her implantation, she exhibited three vowel types. During her first year of implant experience, she had a total of nine diverse vowel types were detected, and a full range of height and place categories were represented. In Peterson and Barney research data collection involved recording as 76 speakers as the same utter words repeatedly while in Vowel System study, video and audio recordings were used to collect data. Recordings of mother-child playing were made before and after cochlear implantation.

Data Collection and Analyzing

Two footages were made in the month before Hannah received her implant, and 12 sessions were recorded on a monthly basis after implant activation. The first pre-implantation and three post-implantation samples were recorded in quiet rooms in a speech and unoccupied preschool classroom or hearing clinic. The rest of the samples were made at home, and all audio recordings were prepared using a Realistic Pressure Zone microphone, an STM-2 microphone amplifier and a Marantz cassette recorder (model PMD 221) (Ertmer, 8). Dairies notes were also used to collect data since Hannah’s mother was requested to make entries in a diary whenever she noticed speech production behaviors and new speech perception. She therefore orthographically recorded words that her daughter appeared to produce and comprehend. These notes were used to validate findings from audio and videotape recordings. The subjects in Peterson and Barney research were 76 speakers including 33 men, 15 children, and 28 women. Each recorded two lists of 10 words totaling to 1520 recorded words and 70 listeners were involved in these sessions.

Data Analysis and Results

The researchers collected data widely in this study compared to the Vowel System because it did not just consider one subject. In Peterson and Barney study 2 of the subjects were born outside the U.S, and a few others spoke a foreign language before they learned English. Most of the children and women grew up in the Middle Atlantic speech area (Peterson, Gordon, and Barney, 6). The male speakers represented a much wider regional sampling of the United States because the majority of them spoke General American. In both articles data was analyzed using sound spectrographs where the vowels were filled according to pronunciation. The autistic difference occurred because the production of vowel sounds by people is not a random process due to abnormal distribution of the autistic sounds making people subjective to responses. Moreover, certain of the vowels are normally essay and therefore better understood than others, and this could be because they represent boundary positions of the articulatory mechanisms.

Works Cited

Peterson, Gordon E., and Harold L. Barney. “Control methods used in a study of the vowels.” The Journal of the acoustical society of America 24.2 (1952): 1-10.

Ertmer, David J. “Emergence of a vowel system in a young cochlear implant recipient.” Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 44.4 (2001): 1-11.