Spectral moment vs. bark cepstral analysis of children's word-initial voiceles stops

Bunnell, H. Timothy; Polikoff, James B.; McNicholas, Jane

doi:10.21437/interspeech.2004-81

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 9 publications

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“…Since they were 'borrowed' from the speech processing literature into linguistic studies, cepstral coefficients have proven to be an informative measure regarding the strength of various types of contrasts [9], including the voicing contrast in fricatives. Thus, cepstral coefficients were previously successful in categorizing English obstruent bursts [10], English vowels [11], Romanian fricatives [12,13], Russian sibilant fricatives [14], Azerbaijani fricatives [15], and Greek fricatives [16]. The potential advantages of using this measure in phonetic studies have been discussed extensively in recent literature.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Voicing neutralization in Romanian fricatives across different speech styles

Spinu¹,

Vasilescu²,

Lamel³

et al. 2022

Interspeech 2022

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Romance languages such as Italian or Spanish preserve fricative voicing contrasts in word-final position, while their neutralization has been reported for European Portuguese, but the behavior of Romanian fricatives remains understudied. Previous work with Romanian fricatives suggests a pattern of final devoicing but, due to the specific properties of the corpus analyzed, it is unclear if this is limited to the presence of secondary palatalization and/or the result of morphological conditioning. In this study, we apply speech processing tools to investigate the acoustic characteristics of the voicing contrast in fricatives in contemporary spoken Romanian. We examine a corpus of prepared speech from newscasts and semi-spontaneous TV debates (86 speakers) and compare our results to previous findings from a corpus of controlled experimental speech (31 speakers). Our classification tool employs cepstral coefficients and hidden Markov model (HMM)-defined temporal regions to identify the properties of these segments. Our findings conform to typological predictions regarding partial devoicing in coda position, especially at more posterior places, but we find little support for voicing neutralization in Romanian fricatives more generally. Our study thus documents the properties of Romanian fricatives and contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of contrast maintenance in phonological systems.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Voicing neutralization in Romanian fricatives across different speech styles

Spinu¹,

Vasilescu²,

Lamel³

et al. 2022

Interspeech 2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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Spectral Moment Analysis of Unilateral Vocal Fold Paralysis

Colton¹,

Paseman²,

Kelley³

et al. 2011

Journal of Voice

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Exploring the front fricative contrast in Greek: A study of acoustic variability based on cepstral coefficients

Lilley¹,

Spinu²,

Athanasopoulou³

2020

Journal of the International Phonetic Association

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In the current study, we explore the factors underlying the well-known difficulty in acoustic classification of front nonsibilant fricatives (Maniwa, Jongman & Wade 2009, McMurray & Jongman 2011) by applying a novel classification method to the production of Greek speakers. The Greek fricative inventory [f v θ ð s z ç ʝ x ɣ] includes voiced and voiceless segments from five distinct places of articulation. Our corpus contains all of the Greek fricatives produced by 29 monolingual speakers, but our focus is on the distinction between the front nonsibilant fricatives [f v θ ð]. For comparison, we also discuss the other places of articulation where relevant. We apply a relatively novel classification method based on cepstral coefficients, previously successful in categorizing English obstruent bursts (Bunnell, Polikoff & McNicholas 2004), English vowels (Ferragne & Pellegrino 2010), Romanian fricatives (Spinu & Lilley 2016), and Russian fricatives (Spinu, Kochetov & Lilley 2018). For this study, fricative boundaries were automatically aligned using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and then manually checked. Six Bark-frequency cepstral coefficients (c0–c5) were extracted from 20-millisecond Hann windows. HMMs were used to divide the fricatives and adjacent vowels into three regions of internally minimized variance. A multinomial logistic regression analysis then used the mean cepstral coefficients from each region as predictors for classification by consonant identity. Our method yields highly successful classification rates, exceeding the performance of previous methods. We discuss these results in light of the differences of the phonemic distributions of fricatives between English and Greek.

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Spectral moment vs. bark cepstral analysis of children's word-initial voiceles stops

Cited by 3 publications

References 9 publications

Voicing neutralization in Romanian fricatives across different speech styles

Voicing neutralization in Romanian fricatives across different speech styles

Spectral Moment Analysis of Unilateral Vocal Fold Paralysis

Exploring the front fricative contrast in Greek: A study of acoustic variability based on cepstral coefficients

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