A novel approach to articulatory-acoustic feature extraction has been developed for enhancing the accuracy of classification associated with place and manner of articulation information. This "elitist" approach is tested on a corpus of spontaneous Dutch using two different systems, one trained on a subset of the same corpus, the other trained on a corpus from a different language (American English). The feature dimensions, voicing and manner of articulation transfer relatively well between the two languages. However, place information transfers less well. Manner-specific training can be used to improve classification of articulatory place information.