This paper presents a two-stage procedure, based on the Fisher criterion and automatic classification trees, for designing acoustic parameters (APs) that target phonetic features in the speech signal. This procedure and a subset of the TIMIT 1 training set were used to develop acoustic parameters for the phonetic features: sonorant, syllabic, strident, palatal, alveolar, labial and velar. Results on a subset of the TIMIT test set show that the developed parameters achieve correct phonetic-feature classification rates in the 90 % range with the exception of stop- consonant place of articulation (labial, alveolar and velar) where correct classification is about 73 %. Furthermore, it is shown that by basing the acoustic parameters on relative measures (e.g. an acoustic parameter that measures energy in a frequency band relative to energy in the same band at another time instant) the effect of interspeaker variability (e.g. gender) on the parameters is reduced.