Acoustic correlates of American English diphthongs.

Abstract

Various studies on diphthongs suggest that they can be effectively classified in terms of either (1) the pattern of the fundamental frequency and formants at the onset and offset of the production, (2) the onset pattern and the F2 rate of transition, or (3) the onset pattern and the direction of formant movement in an acoustic space [Nearey and Assmann, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 80, 1297–1308 (1986)]. Extending earlier reports [Gottfried, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 89, 1997 (1991)] these three hypotheses were assessed in (a) a log F1×log F2 space and (b) an auditory-perceptual space. Values for the relevant parameters were obtained for a corpus of 768 productions of American English diphthongs (6 diphthongs ×4 speakers ×2 tempos ×2 stress conditions ×2 consonantal contexts). The hypotheses were then evaluated in terms of classification performance using a statistical pattern recognition procedure. Results indicate that the acoustic parameters specified in each hypothesis were effective in obtaining correct classification of diphthongs. [Work was supported by NIDCD.]