Relational spectral features for place of articulation in nasal consonants

Much recent research on acoustic cues for consonants' places of articulation has focused upon the nature of the rapid spectral changes that take place between signal portions corresponding to consonantal closure and adjacent vowels. The study reported here builds on the foundation laid by earlier studies that have explored techniques for representing spectral change and for classifying place of articulation of nasal consonants using features extracted from rapid spectral changes that take place over murmur-to-vowel transitions. A new procedure is reported that avoids the use of predetermined absolute frequency bands in deriving parameters of spectral change in nasals. In experiments using the speech of 20 female and 20 male talkers, in a variety of physical and perceptual spectral scalings, application of the new procedure results in 77% correct classification of place of articulation of syllable-initial nasals and 51% correct classification of place of articulation of syllable-final nasals (for which there is a three-way contrast). Tested on the same data, a technique using predetermined absolute frequency bands produced 72% correct classification of syllable-initial nasals.