Aperiodicity cue for fricative voicing contrasts

This study examines acoustic cues to voicing contrasts in French consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel sequences containing fricatives. We introduce an aperiodicity metric derived from the YIN difference function and evaluate its ability to capture voicing properties in controlled, noise-free speech materials. Results show that the proposed measure enables reliable, objective classification of fricatives as voiced or unvoiced. When combined with a conventional acoustic feature (root mean square amplitude), the metric provides complementary information and supports accurate classification (approximately 83% overall) among unvoiced fricatives, voiced fricatives, and vowels using standard classifiers. These results demonstrate that aperiodicity-based cues offer a valuable addition to established spectral and amplitude-based features for detailed phoneme characterization.