Factors in classification of stop consonant place of articulation

The goal of this study is to uncover significant factors in the classification of English stop consonant place of articulation, and determine their relative importance to the classification. Factor analysis arranges a set of acoustic attributes used for the classification into factors that can be interpreted in terms of articulatory attributes. Each factor is found to be comprised of attributes explaining a particular aspect of the acoustic cues significant to place classification. For a stop in CV context, significant factors are: ‘normalized burst amplitude’, ‘burst shape’, ‘formant frequency’, and ‘formant transition’. The first two always remain regardless of the vowel frontness. The two formant-related factors arrange differently depending on the frontness. Discriminant analysis is deployed to determine the contribution of each factor to the classification. Without vowel frontness information, the burst-related factors are found to contribute more than the formant-related factors do. However, with known frontness, the opposite is true.