Selecting syllable nuclei in French
Matthew Lennig · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1977
Monophthongal vowels are often said to be specifiable in terms of their target positions [R. Houde, SCRL Monograph No. 2 (1968)]. In this paper criteria for selecting vowel nuclei within syllables of free-running conversational French are described and evaluated for their ability to represent the impressionistic phonetic quality of measured vowels. Input to the nucleus selection algorithm is a syllable matrix whose rows contain the peak frequencies of the linear prediction model spectrum of the syllable at progressively later points in time. A fast method for eliminating gross errors (e.g., missing or extra formants) is proposed. This method is applied to each syllable matrix. Nuclei are then selected based on the steady-state criterion: The point of minimum rate of change of the first and second formant frequencies. Other nucleus selection criteria, such as points of inflection and extrema of the formant frequencies are compared to the steady state criterion with respect to their representational ability of perceived similarities and differences of vowel timbre. [Work supported by NSF.]