Browse > Article
http://dx.doi.org/10.13064/KSSS.2018.10.2.007

A corpus-based study on the effects of voicing and gender on American English Fricatives  

Yoon, Tae-Jin (성신여자대학교)
Publication Information
Phonetics and Speech Sciences / v.10, no.2, 2018 , pp. 7-14 More about this Journal
Abstract
The paper investigates the acoustic characteristics of English fricatives in the TIMIT corpus, with a special focus on the role of voicing in rendering fricatives in American English. The TIMIT database includes 630 talkers and 2,342 different sentences, and comprises more than five hours of speech. Acoustic analyses are conducted in the domain of spectral and temporal properties by treating gender, voicing, and place of articulation as independent factors. The results of the acoustic analyses revealed that acoustic signals interact in a complex way to signal the gender, place, and voicing of fricatives. Classification experiments using a multiclass support vector machine (SVM) revealed that 78.7% of fricatives are correctly classified. The majority of errors stem from the misclassification of /θ/ as [f] and /ʒ/ as [z]. The average accuracy of gender classification is 78.7%. Most errors result from the classification of female speakers as male speakers. The paper contributes to the understanding of the effects of voicing and gender on fricatives in a large-scale speech corpus.
Keywords
acoustic analysis; fricatives; gender; SVM; TIMIT corpus; voicing;
Citations & Related Records
Times Cited By KSCI : 1  (Citation Analysis)
연도 인용수 순위
1 R Core Team (2015). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. Retrieved from http://www.R-project.org/ on April 4, 2018.
2 Stevens, K. N. (1971). Airflow and turbulence noise for fricative and stop consonants: Static considerations. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 50(4B), 1180-1192.   DOI
3 Wagner, A., Ernestus, M., & Cutler, A. (2006). Formant transitions in fricative identification: The role of native fricative inventory. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 120(4), 2267-2277.   DOI
4 Whiteside, S. (1998). Identification of a speaker's sex: A fricative study. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 86(2), 587-591.   DOI
5 Wilde, L. F. (2005). Analysis and synthesis of fricative consonants. Ph.D. Dissertation, MIT.
6 Yoon, T. (2015). A corpus-based study on the effects of gender on voiceless fricatives in American English. Phonetics and Speech Sciences, 7(1), 117-124.   DOI
7 Zue, V., & Seneff, S. (1988). Transcription and alignment of the TIMIT database. Proceedings of the Second Meeting on Advanced Man-Machine Interface through Spoken Language: 11.1-11.10.
8 Baum, S. R., & Blumstein, S. E. (1987). Preliminary observations on the use of duration as a cue to syllable-initial fricative consonant voicing in English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 82(3), 1073-1077.   DOI
9 Behrens, S. J., & Blumstein, S. E. (1988a). Acoustic characteristics of English voiceless fricatives: A descriptive analysis. Journal of Phonetics, 16(3), 295-298.
10 Behrens, S. J., & Blumstein, S. E. (1988b). On the role of the amplitude of the fricative noise in the perception of place of articulation in voiceless fricative consonants. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 84(3), 861-867.   DOI
11 Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2015) Praat: Doing phonetics by computer. [Computer program], Version 5.4.05. Retrieved from http://www.praat.org on January 5, 2015.
12 Byrd, D. (1994). Relations of sex and dialect to reduction. Speech Communication, 15, 39-54.   DOI
13 Crystal, T. H., & House, A. S. (1988). Segmental durations in connected-speech signals: Current results. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 83(4), 1553-1573.   DOI
14 Docherty, G. (1992). The timing of voicing in British English obstruents. Berlin: Foris Publications.
15 Karatzoglou, A., Smola, A., Hornik, K., & Zeileis, A. (2004). Kernlab - An S4 package for kernel methods in R. Journal of Statistical Software, 11(9), 1-20.
16 Narayanan, S., Alwan, A., & Haker, K. (1994). An MRI study of fricative consonants. Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (pp. 627-630), Yokohama, Japan.
17 Forrest, K., Weismer, G., Milenkovic, P., & Dougall, R. N. (1988). Statistical analysis of word-initial voiceless obstruents: Preliminary data. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 84(1), 115-124.   DOI
18 Gordon, M., Bathmaier, P., & Sands, K.(2002). A cross-linguistic acoustic study of voiceless fricatives. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 32(2), 141-174.   DOI
19 Haggard, M. (1978). The devoicing of voiced fricatives. Journal of Phonetics, 6(2), 95-101.
20 Johnson, K. (2012). Acoustic and auditory phonetics (2nd edtition). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
21 Labov, W., Cohen, P., Robins, C., & Lewis, J. (1968). A study of the non-standard English of Negro and Puerto Rican speakers in New York City. Final report, Cooperative Research Project 3288, Vols. I and II, U.S. Regional Survey, Philadelphia.
22 Ladefoged, P. (1982). A course in phonetics. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
23 Maniwa, K., Jongman, A., & Wade, T. (2009). Acoustic characteristic of clearly spoken English fricatives. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 125(6), 3962-3973.   DOI
24 McGuire, G., & Babel, M. (2012). A cross-modal account for synchronic and diachronic patterns of /f/ and /${\theta}$/ in English. Laboratory Phonology, 3(2), 215-271.
25 McMurray, B., & Jongman, A. (2011). What information is necessary for speech categorization? Harnessing variability in the speech signal by integrating cues computed relative to expectations. Psychological Review, 118(2), 219-246.   DOI
26 Jongman, A., Wayland, R., & Wong, S. (2000). Acoustic characteristics of English fricatives. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 108(3), 1252-1263.   DOI
27 Miller, G., & Nicely, P. (1955). An analysis of perceptual confusions among some English consonants. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 27(2), 338-352.   DOI
28 Narayanan, S., Alwan, A., & Haker, K. (1995). An articulatory study of fricative consonants using magnetic resonance imaging. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 98(3), 1325-1347.   DOI