Auditory features for human communication of stop consonants under full-band and low-pass conditions

A set of auditorily-formulated features for PLACE discrimination in stop consonants, uncovered in extensive experiments with natural and edited sounds, are now being modeled using fuzzy logic and being applied to large databases of monosyllabic and spelled letters speech sounds, in various languages, in full-band and low-pass conditions. The rationale is that any valid model of human communication should replicate the human listener “feats” of very good (albeit not perfect) discrimination of stop PLACE even from speakers of different languages, and of “graceful degradation” when faced with markedly low-pass filtered sounds (e.g., telephone-like). This paper reports mainly about fuzzy-logical models, expressing known auditory phenomena, that evaluate the high-frequency content of the burst+aspiration segment in stop consonants, and provides a powerful cue for discrimination of DENTAL consonants. This evaluation is robust to mild variations of the frequency response curve such as those caused by different recording microphones. These cues are absent from markedly low-pass filtered sounds, however. Other cues, which survive in low-pass sounds (reported in previous papers), are also discussed.