Subject: Re: Stop consonant identification based on initial spectra? From: Abeer Alwan <abeera(at)icsl.ucla.edu> Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2005 09:57:08 -0800Greetings, If I remember correctly, the Blumestein and Stevens papers showed that initial spectra bursts account for about 85% of (correct) place responses. Diane Kewley-Port (1983) modified the fixed time window of Stevens and Blumstein with a running spectral display to include the initial 40 ms of the vowel onset as well. She was able to categorize place of articulation for stops at 88% correct (automatically not perceptually). Even though the initial burst carries important perceptual cues for place of articulation, the burst is quite vulnerable to background noise. In noise, formant transitions play a larger role in identifying place although the importance of the transitions vs. the burst varies with the masker shape (in white noise, the burst is masked at a higher SNR than in speech-shaped noise; in both cases, it is masked at a higher SNR than the formants). W. Chen and A. Alwan, "Perception of the Place of Articulation Feature for Plosives and Fricatives in Noise," in Proc. ICPhS, Barcelona, August, 2003. James J. Hant and Abeer Alwan, "A Psychoacoustic-Masking Model to Predict the Perception of Speech-Like Stimuli in Noise," Speech Communication, Vol. 40, May 2003, pp. 291-313. Regards, Abeer Abeer Alwan, Prof. Dept. of Electrical Engineering, UCLA email: alwan(at)ee.ucla.edu http://www.icsl.ucla.edu/~spapl