Perception of place of articulation for plosives and fricatives in noise

This study aims at uncovering perceptually-relevant acoustic cues for the labial versus alveolar place of articulation distinction in syllable-initial plosives {/b/,/d/,/p/,/t/} and fricatives {/f/,/s/,/v/,/z/} in noise. Speech materials consisted of naturally-spoken consonantvowel (CV) syllables from four talkers where the vowel was one of {/a/,/i/,/u/}. Acoustic analyses using logistic regression show that formant frequency measurements, relative spectral amplitude measurements, and burst/noise durations are generally reliable cues for labial/alveolar classification. In a subsequent perceptual experiment, each pair of syllables with the labial/alveolar distinction (e.g., /ba,da/) was presented to listeners in various levels of signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) in a 2-AFC task. A threshold SNR was obtained for each syllable pair using sigmoid fitting of the percent correct scores. Results show that the perception of the labial/alveolar distinction in noise depends on the manner of articu...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: SPEECH
• Authors: Abeer Alwan, Jintao Jiang, Willa S. Chen
• Keywords: Formant Frequency Measurements, Frequency Measurements, Perceptually-relevant Acoustic Cues, Security Privacy, SPEECH 2011