Across‐talker acoustic properties for place of articulation in nasal consonants Free

Several recent investigations of nasal consonants have focused upon the nature of the spectral change that takes place over the acoustic boundaries between nasal murmurs and vowels. Existing findings that use an algorithmic classification of place of articulation in nasals are based upon data from only a small numbers of talkers. A new method for parametrizing spectral change in nasal‐to‐vowel transitions was developed and was used to develop classification criteria that were applied to a larger talker base of 20 female and 20 male talkers who produced a total of 854 nasal‐initial tokens. Male‐female differences of a predicted kind (approximately 1 Bark spectral shift) were detected. However, the automatic classification criteria were sufficiently robust that, even ignoring such spectral shifts, the technique yielded approximately 79% correct classification of place of articulation in initial nasals. [Research supported by Alvey Project MMI 092.