KUPPL
The University of Kansas
15 Blake Hall
Lawrence, KS 66045-3129
Phone: 785-864-3414
Fax: 785-864-5724
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Journal of Phonetics 1985,
13: 235-251
Acoustic
properties for dental and alveolar stop consonants: a cross-language study
Allard Jongman,
Sheila Blumstein
and Aditi Lahiri
| This study explored
whether there exists an invariant acoustic property which can distinguish
dental from alveolar stops consonants. Experiment I investigated dental
and alveolar stops in Malayalam, a language which uses these sounds contrastively.
It was found that a measure of the rms amplitude of the burst normalized
to the rms amplitude of the vowel could distinguish the two classes of stop
consonants. The rms amplitude of alveolar stops is larger than that of dental
stops. Using a difference of approximately 14db between the amplitude of
the burst and that of the vowel as a cut-off between denter and alveolar
stops, 91.8% of the data could be classified correctly. Experiment II explored
whether the metric established for Malayalam could correctly characterize
dental and alveolar stops in two languages that have either dental or alveolar
stops, but do not contrast these two classes of stop consonants. the burst
amplitude for English CV and for Dutch CV(C) syllables was analysed. Results
showed that for English only 68.2% of the alveolars, and for Dutch only
63.2% of the dentals, were classified correctly. Implications of these findings
for a theory of acoustic invariance are discussed. |
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