Psychoacoustic measures of stop production in Cantonese, Greek, English, Japanese, and Korean.

Abstract

Spectral analyses of stop bursts have revealed that the place of articulation can be predicted based on both invariant and time‐varying cues present within the acoustic signal (e.g., Stevens and Blumstein, 1978; Forrest et al., 1988). While prior studies have had some success in uncovering such cues for American English, it is not clear whether these parameters are equally pertinent in stoping consonant classification in other languages. Furthermore, one of the main limitations of a linear acoustic analysis is that it imposes different scales of loudness and frequency on the acoustic signal than does the human ear, thus generating power spectra with different frequency distributions than are produced by the auditory system (e.g., Zwicker 1961; Kewley‐Port, 1983). In the present study of word‐initial stops produced in Cantonese, English, Greek, Japanese, and Korean, measures derived from a psychoacoustic model of auditory perception were developed in order to more accurately isolate the front cavity resonances of the burst transient. For all languages, peak amplitude frequency and a peak compactness measure successfully distinguished alveolar from velar stops with at least 74% accuracy and were more accurate at stop classification than were spectral moments measures.