FreqUency analyses of syllable initial and final liquids spoken by American English talkers
Ann K. Syrdal · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1982
First, second, and third formant frequencies measured during the relatively steady-state portion of the liquid were converted to the Bark scale, an auditory scale of perceived pitch in units of critical bands. Analyses were performed on previously reported acoustic data derived from spectrographic measurements of liquids produced by female and male adult and young children talkers [I. Lehiste, U. of Michigan Comm. Sciences Lab. Report No. 9 (1962), and R. M. Dalston, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 57, 462–469 (1975)], and on formant frequencies of adult talkers estimated by linear prediction techniques. The differences between Bark-transformed F3 and F2 and between F2 and F1 were calculated. F3−F2 differences greater than 3.5 Bark were consistently found for /l/, while those less than 3.5 Bark were found for /r/. Syllable initial and final allophones of /l/ were differentiated by F2−F1 differences greater than and less than 3.5 Bark, respectively. These results confirm the importance of a critical formant frequency distance of about 3.5 Bark found in perceptual experiments by the author with synthetic liquids, and by L. A. Chistovich and V. V. Lublinskaya for synthetic Russian vowels [Hearing Res. 1, 185–194 (1979)]. [Work supported by NIH and performed in part at the Research Lab. of Electronics, M.I.T.]