14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Contextual Effects on Consonant Voicing Profiles: A Cross-Linguistic Study

Chilin Shih (1), Bernd Möbius (1,2), Bhuvana Narasimhan (1)

(1) Bell Labs – Lucent Technologies, USA; (2) University of Stuttgart, Germany

In this paper we present selected results from a study of the voicing profiles of consonants in five languages, viz. Mandarin Chinese, German, Hindi, Mexican Spanish, and Italian. We will focus here on the voicing properties of stop closures in these languages. The voicing profile is defined as the frame-by-frame voicing status of a speech sound in continuous speech. We propose statistical models that predict the probability of voicing from phone identity, neighbouring phones, and positional and prosodic factors.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Shih, Chilin / Möbius, Bernd / Narasimhan, Bhuvana (1999): "Contextual effects on consonant voicing profiles: a cross-linguistic study", In ICPhS-14, 989-992.