Classification of affricate burst place in consonant-vowel contexts in English

Abstract

This study investigates characteristics of affricate burst place of articulation compared with the bursts for the three places of articulation for stops (labial, alveolar, and velar) in English. The data comprise consonant-vowel tokens in the TIMIT corpus. To assess which stop place of articulation may be used to simultaneously model affricate bursts, Jensen-Shannon divergence measures are found for probability distributions of acoustic-phonetic features. In addition, we conduct classification experiments using combinations of acoustic-phonetic features and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), to see how well affricate burst place is classified using models for the three stop places. The experimental results show that although affricate place is similar to the alveolar place of articulation for stops, a separate post-alveolar place for affricate burst provides a better model. The results suggest that a separate affricate place model will be useful in a feature-based speech recognition system that explicitly detects place of articulation for consonants.