ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1993
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1993

Frequency variations of the lowest main spectral peak in sibilant clusters

Noel Nguyen, Philip Hoole

This work was aimed at analyzing the frequency variations of the lowest main spectral peak in the production of sibilants. According to the quantal theory of speech production, a continuous articulatory movement from /s/ to /f/ (or vice-versa) should provoke an abrupt and discontinuous change in the frequency of this peak. In the present work, a French native speaker was asked to produce consonant clusters of the type [sf] and [fs] combined with [a], [i] and [u]. Articulatory (electromagnetic) data and acoustic data were simultaneously recorded. First results show that variations of the acoustic output as a function of the location of the constriction are clearly non-linear when the surrounding vowels are unrounded. In the vicinity of [u] however, the acoustic transition between the two fricatives are more gradual, probably because [s] is produced in that context with a rounding of the lips which results in a lowering of the spectrum.