TY - JOUR
T1 - Duration and spectral balance of intervocalic consonants
T2 - A case for efficient communication
AU - Van Son, R. J.J.H.
AU - Van Santen, Jan P.H.
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was made possible by grants 300-173-029, 355-75-001, and 276-75-002 of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). NWO also supplied the additional funding which made this collaboration possible. This work was partly performed at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill NJ, USA. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their many detailed and helpful comments.
PY - 2005
Y1 - 2005
N2 - The prosodic structure of speech and the redundancy of words can significantly strengthen or weaken segmental articulation. This paper investigates the acoustic effects of lexical stress, intra-word location, and predictability on sentence internal intervocalic consonants from accented words, using meaningful reading materials from 4157 sentences read by two American English speakers. Consonant duration and spectral balance in such reading materials show reduction in unstressed consonants and in consonants occurring later in the word (Initial vs. Medial vs. Final). Coronal consonants behaved distinctly, which was interpreted as a shift from full to flap or tap articulation in a subset of the phoneme realizations. This shift in articulation, and part of the consonant specific acoustic variation, could be linked to the frequency distribution of consonant classes over the investigated conditions. A higher frequency of occurrence of a consonant class in our corpus and a CELEX word-list was associated with shorter durations and differences in spectral balance that would increase the communicative efficiency of speech.
AB - The prosodic structure of speech and the redundancy of words can significantly strengthen or weaken segmental articulation. This paper investigates the acoustic effects of lexical stress, intra-word location, and predictability on sentence internal intervocalic consonants from accented words, using meaningful reading materials from 4157 sentences read by two American English speakers. Consonant duration and spectral balance in such reading materials show reduction in unstressed consonants and in consonants occurring later in the word (Initial vs. Medial vs. Final). Coronal consonants behaved distinctly, which was interpreted as a shift from full to flap or tap articulation in a subset of the phoneme realizations. This shift in articulation, and part of the consonant specific acoustic variation, could be linked to the frequency distribution of consonant classes over the investigated conditions. A higher frequency of occurrence of a consonant class in our corpus and a CELEX word-list was associated with shorter durations and differences in spectral balance that would increase the communicative efficiency of speech.
KW - Acoustic reduction
KW - Prosodic structure
KW - Redundancy
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U2 - 10.1016/j.specom.2005.06.005
DO - 10.1016/j.specom.2005.06.005
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:24144457252
SN - 0167-6393
VL - 47
SP - 100
EP - 123
JO - Speech Communication
JF - Speech Communication
IS - 1-2
ER -