Mapping the Turkish vowel space: A comprehensive vowel production study

Turkish vowel production studies to date have either small numbers of speakers or involve uncontrolled production stimuli that do not account for allophonic, contextual, or coarticulatory variation. This study aims to provide a comprehensive description of the Turkish vowel space, offering a thorough examination of proposed Turkish vowel allophones in the literature and an exhaustive analysis of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in Turkish. Twenty-six monolingually raised adult native Turkish speakers (17 females) produced 1600 Turkish vowel tokens in controlled phonetic contexts, forming minimal pairs across syllable-initial, medial, and final positions in monosyllabic and polysyllabic words and nonwords, within carrier sentences and read passages. I analyze formant values, duration, and spectral change to describe the canonical vowel space of Turkish and discuss allophonic and coarticulatory variation due to vocalic and consonantal context. I outline how the Turkish productions collected in this work will be published as a publicly available Turkish corpus, inviting further phonetic analysis, and serving as a resource for stimuli in future speech perception experiments.