

1pSP6. A locus equation study of syllable-final stop place of articulation.

Harvey M. Sussman

Dept. of Linguist. and Speech Commun., Univ. of Texas, Austin, TX 78712

Jadine Shore

David Fruchter

Univ. of Texas, Austin, TX 78712

Syllable-final stops have different coarticulatory and perceptual properties compared to syllable-initial stops. Locus equations have previously been used to acoustically characterize place of articulation for initial stop consonants [H. Sussman, H. McCaffrey, and S. Matthews, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 90, 1309--1325 (1991) and H. Sussman, K. Hoemeke, and F. Ahmed, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 94, 1256--1268 (1993)]. Since locus equations also encode degree of coarticulation, they might also provide an adequate phonetic description of VC events for final /b/, /d/, and /g/ following varied vowel contexts. Each of ten speakers, five male and five female, produced three repetitions of 90 CVC tokens. For each final stop (/b,d,g/) there were ten medial vowels and three initial consonants---bVb, dVb, gVb, bVd, dVd, gVd, bVg, dVg, gVg. Three points along the second formant were measured---F2 onset (Hz), F2 midvowel (Hz), and F2 offset (Hz). Offset locus equations (VC) were generated for each syllable-final stop place, both across initial consonantal contexts and as a function of each initial stop. In addition, 3-D plots were generated to determine how F2 onset (x), midpoint (y), and offset (z) could acoustically capture and differentiate lexical contrasts. [Work supported by NIDCD.]