Acoustic waveforms of the strident fricatives /s/, /z/, /integral of/, and /3/ spoken by two native American English speakers are analyzed using modern chaotic analysis techniques. Fricative data are extracted from both intervocalic and sustained utterances. For comparison, acoustic waveforms of the vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/ are also analyzed. For 44% of the unvoiced fricative tokens in VCV cont...

Voicing contrasts in stop consonants are expressed by a constellation of acoustic cues. This study focused on a spectral cue present at burst onset in American English labial and coronal stops. Spectral shape was examined for word-initial, prevocalic stops of all three places of articulation in a laboratory production study and a large corpus of continuous read speech. Voiceless labial and coro...

In this paper, the implementation of a robust front-end to be used for a large-vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (CSR) system based on a Voiced-Unvoiced (V-U) decision has been addressed. Our approach is based on the separation of the speech signal into voiced and unvoiced components. Consequently, speech enhancement can be achieved through processing of the voiced and the unvoiced compo...

An improved spectral subtraction algorithm for enhancing speech corrupted by additive wideband noise is described. The artifactual noise introduced by spectral subtraction that is perceived as musical noise is 7 dB less than that introduced by the classical spectral subtraction algorithm of Berouti et al. Speech is decomposed into voiced and unvoiced sections. Since voiced speech is primarily s...

Words in connected speech are often assimilated to subsequent words. Some property of that upcoming word may then be determined in advance; these advance assimilatory cues may facilitate perception of that word. A gating experiment was conducted in Dutch, studying anticipatory voice assimilation between plosives, in 24 two-word combinations. In Dutch, voicing in a word-final plosive can only be...

Cross-language perception of phonetic features was investigated via an experiment in which native speakers of Korean and English identified speech sounds varying across voicing (voiced vs. voiceless), place of articulation (labial vs. coronal), and manner of articulation (stop vs. fricative) features as well as prosodic context (syllable initial vs. syllable final). Because Korean has no anteri...

For stimuli modeling stop consonants varying in the acoustic correlates of voice onset time (VOT), human listeners are more likely to perceive stimuli with lower f0's as voiced consonants--a pattern of perception that follows regularities in English speech production. The present study examines the basis of this observation. One hypothesis is that lower f0's enhance perception of voiced stops b...

This paper provides an overview of theoretical and experimental investigations of voiced geminates in Japanese. Active discussion was initiated by Nishimura’s (2003) discovery that in Japanese loanword phonology, voiced geminates can be devoiced, when they co-occur with another voiced obstruent (e.g. /doggu/ → /dokku/). This context-sensitive devoicing of geminates has received much theoretical...