Previous work on automatic VOT measurement has focused on positive-valued VOT. However, in many languages VOT can be either positive or negative (“prevoiced”). We present a discriminative algorithm that simultaneously decides whether a stop is prevoiced and measures its VOT. The algorithm operates on feature functions designed to locate the burst and voicing onsets in the positive and negative VOT cases. Tested on a database of positive- and negative-VOT voiced stops, the algorithm predicts prevoicing with >90% accuracy, and gives good agreement between automatic and manual measurements.

Index Terms: voice onset time, automatic phonetic measurement, discriminative methods, structured prediction