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

Revisiting Place of Articulation Measures for Stop Consonants: Implications for Models of Consonant Production

Kenneth N. Stevens (1), Sharon Y. Manuel (1,2), Melanie Matthies (1,3)

(1) Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
(2) Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA; (3) Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

This paper reports on revised analysis procedures that are being developed to identify place of articulation for stop consonants. These procedures are being used to examine the sources of variability that exist in the acoustic characteristics of these consonants for different phonetic contexts, speakers, and speaking styles. There are three motivations for this work: (1) to improve models of articulatory-to-acoustic mapping; (2) to develop procedures and data that can be used in knowledgebased automatic speech recognition and in speech synthesis; and (3) to provide a baseline of the normal range of variation of these consonants, against which clinicians can evaluate disordered production. The data show that combining a variety of acoustic properties from the bursts and transitions for stop consonants leads to robust classification of place of articulation, particularly if the gender of the speaker and if the feature [back] in the adjacent vowel is known.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Stevens, Kenneth N. / Manuel, Sharon Y. / Matthies, Melanie (1999): "Revisiting place of articulation measures for stop consonants: implications for models of consonant production", In ICPhS-14, 1117-1120.