Study of the acoustic features of word juncture using speech analysis and synthesis
Lloyd H. Nakatani, Kathleen D. Dukes · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1976
People can usually distinguish the word juncture in contrastive twins of word pairs such as play nice and plain ice. We can see many features which differ between the twins in spectrograms, but observation alone cannot tell us which features ate important to the perception of juncture. The contributions of pitch, amplitude, timing, and segmental features to juncture perception were studied as follows. Parametric representations of twins X and Y were obtained by analyzing natural speech, and the above features were exchanged between the twins in a complete factorial design. A feature f was considered important for juncture perception if exchanging f between X and Y also caused perception to be exchanged; that is, listeners heard Y when presented with X possessing feature f of Y, and vice versa. Listeners' responses indicated that all the features were important, but the importance of any particular feature or set of features depended on the juncture consonant. Features also interacted prominently for some consonants