The Perceptual Vowel Spaces of American English and Modern Greek: A Comparison

Perceptually based vowel spaces are estimated for American English and Modern Greek by means of identifications of synthetic vowel sounds by native speakers of each language. The vowel spaces for American English appear to be organized in a sufficiently contrastive system, while Modern Greek vowels appear to be maximally contrastive. The spaces for the Modern Greek point vowels ([i], [a], [u]) fall within the spaces of their American English counterparts, while the intermediate Modern Greek vowels ([e], [o]) overlap the American English [∊]/[e] and [[UNKNOWN]]/[o] spaces, respectively. These results were relatively unaffected by mapping resolution and level of phonetic training and support the results of similar mappings using production data.