The classification of Greek fricatives with cepstral coefficients.

Abstract

This study examines the classification of Greek fricatives based on place and manner of articulation. Greek is particularly rich in fricatives, so a total of 10 segment types are considered: voiced and voiceless segments at five places (labial, dental, alveolar, palatal, and velar). For each segment the first five bark-cepstral coefficients were extracted and the values were used in a linear discriminant analysis to separate the different place categories in a statistically optimal way. Data from ten native Greek speakers are currently being analyzed, and preliminary results indicate that the classification of Greek fricatives is generally comparable to that of a similar study with Romanian fricatives [Spinu, L. (2010); Palatalization in Romanian: Experimental and theoretical approaches, Ph. D. thesis University of Delaware.], where overall accuracy of the classification was 78%. Nevertheless, since the inventory of modern Greek fricatives is rather different from that of Romanian, and it crucially includes a contrast between labials and interdentals, which has traditionally posed problems to this type of analysis; it is anticipated that some differences will also be observed. This, in turn, will provide further insights into the nature of fricatives across languages.