Volín, J. & Studenovský, D. (2007) Normalization of Czech vowels from continuous read texts. In Trouvain, J. & Barry, W. (eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, p185-190. Paper ID 1722.
The effectiveness of vowel normalization methods has been suggested to be language-dependent. Six such methods have been used on Czech vowels to see which of them would lead to the best results in follow-up discriminant analyses while preserving the linguistically informative detail. The discriminant analyses had lower success rates for read continuous texts with multiple tokens from 75 speakers than for the carefully-pronounced monosyllables used previously by other authors, suggesting that the results might also be material-dependent. On the other hand, our variable data offered additional insights into sources of contextual variation and allowed us to identify the so-called enhancing contexts in which identity of a vowel is best preserved.
