Across-speaker and within-speaker variability of British English sibilant spectral characteristics

Abstract

Testing hypotheses regarding the potential as phoneme discriminators of certain properties of “physical” and “auditorily transformed” sibilant spectra [A. Bladon and F. Seitz, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 80, S19 (1986)], the present study draws on a database of 20 male and 20 female talkers, containing over 2000 tokens of /s/, /∫/, /z/, and /ȝ/ in a variety of phonetic contexts and speaking styles. Two automatic parameter extraction routines were used to obtain measurements, for each token, of physical and auditorily scaled values of the main spectral peak, gradients of the leading and trailing spectral edges, and bandwidth of the peak. Especially in females' productions of the apicals, large and characteristic variations in these parameters were observed as correlates of individual talker, phonetic context, and style. Overviews of the envelopes of physical and auditory variation are given; based upon this knowledge, a speaker-adaptive strategy for discrimination of British English sibilants is proposed. [Work supported by the Alvey Programme.]