Volume 52, Issue 4

This study concerns the extent to which place of articulation in the voiced obstruents /b d dz g/ can be separated from spectral parameters taken in the burst, formant transitions, and a combination of the two. Classifications were obtained by training on citation-form data produced by male speakers and testing on (i) citation-form data produced by female speakers and (ii) continuous speech data produced by the same male speakers. The results show that there is more information for the place distinction in the burst than in formant transitions; when the parameters are combined into a single model, classification scores are improved for the citation-form data, but not for the continuous speech data. The highest classification scores were in the vicinity of 90% correct for both types of data on the combined parameters. The results are seen as supporting a model of sufficient discriminability rather than one in which phonetic categories are characterised by invariant acoustic cues.

This report considers the articulatory organization of English consonant sequences with their adjacent vowels. Electropal-atography is used to examine the production of sequences of one to four consonants in length. Two aspects of the production of consonant sequences are investigated. First, the phenomenon of compensatory shortening is addressed. Second, the evidence for a global timing organization for consonant sequences is investigated. This experiment evaluates predictions of Browman and Goldstein [1988] regarding the significance of the C-center in the timing of consonant sequences. Some support for global timing relationships is found; however, underlying syllable affiliations are suggested to be important in the selection of timing arrangements.

One purpose of the present study was to examine displacement variability of lower lip and jaw movements to determine whether sounds that are generally learned earlier and should, therefore, have been practiced more (e. g., stops and nasals) would be less variable than sounds that tend to develop later (e. g., fricatives). It was also of interest to determine whether individual articulators such as the lower lip and the jaw show any differences in displacement variability, given that lower lip gestures may need to be more precise than jaw movements. Repetitions of several labial-initial, CVC stimuli embedded in short phrases produced by three groups of children (5––, 8––, and 11––year-olds) and a group of adults were examined to determine the variability of articulatory gestures. No evidence was found to suggest that fricatives were more variable than stops or nasals for any of the groups. For the children but not the adults, lower lip gestures tended to be more variable than jaw movements.