Quantitative acoustic characteristics of fricative and stop consonant allophones
Janet M. Baker · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1975
It is well known that the acoustic manifestation of any phone is, to varying degrees, a function of its acoustic environment. We have tried to evaluate this explicitly. Our data consisted of all common fricative and stop consonant allophones embedded in carrier phrases, each rendered by three speakers (two male, one female). Time-domain segmentation and analysis, based on individual homogenous segments of frication and release-aspiration, from the fricatives and stops, respectively, and characterized these by six parameters. For each phoneme and speaker, each allophone was normalized with respect to an appropriate neutral referent allophone. Pairwise phoneme recognition tests tried to distinguish to which of 2 phonemes belonged an unknown allophone of one of these. A modified Euclidean distance measure compared the acoustic characteristics of this allophone with the predicted allophone effects derived from all allophone, belonging to /k/ or /p/, was assigned to one of these on the basis of allophone characteristics derived from /g/, /b/, /d/, and /t/, by the same speaker. The ranges of scores for the 3 speakers, for different and same places of articulation, were 71%–86% and 44%–69% for stops, and 83%–95% and 75%–83%, for fricatives, respectively. [Part of work supported by ARPA (♯F44620-73-C-0074), at Carnegie-Mellon University.]