The place of articulation distinction in voiced oral stops

This study concerns the extent to which place of articulation in the voiced obstruents /b d d3 g/ can be separated from spectral parameters taken in the burst, formant transitions, and a combination of the two. Classifications were obtained by training on citation-form data produced by male speakers and testing on (i) citation-form data produced by female speakers and (ii) continuous speech data produced by the same male speakers. The results show that there is more information for the place distinction in the burst than in formant transitions, when the parameters are combined into a single model, classification scores are improved for the citation-form data, but not for the continuous speech data. The highest classification scores were in the vicinity of 90% correct for both types of data on the combined parameters. The results are seen as supporting a model of sufficient discriminability rather than one in which phonetic categories are characterised by invariant acoustic cues.