Preliminary Investigation of the Acoustical Characteristics of Inter-Phonemic Transitions

Abstract

The study employed selected vowels, each combined with prevocalic or post-vocalic consonants in consonant-vowel or vowel-consonant syllables. Each combination was recorded non-contextually by several speakers and then tested by listeners for recognizability of phonemes. Oscillograms and sound spectrograms were made of all syllables correctly identified. These were used to obtain several measures of syllabic component duration and formant frequency change during transition. Measures of direction and extent of frequency change during transitions appeared to offer most promise of relationship to known physiological features of articulation and were subjected to more complete analysis. Results of the study indicate the following: (1) for the first two formants, the transitions reflect aspects of tongue placement for the vowel, and place and manner of articulation and voicing characteristics of the consonant; (2) lack of speaker agreement resulted in variations obscuring most aspects of patterning for the third formant. Specific hypotheses were tested within the limits of the experimental procedure and results are reported. Future research trends are suggested.