Acoustic‐phonetic features for stop consonant place detection in clean and telephone speech

This work classifies voiceless stop consonant place in CV tokens of English using burst release cues for clean (TIMIT) and telephone speech (NTIMIT). We compared the performance of cepstral coefficients to acoustic phonetics‐motivated features such as center of gravity, burst amplitude and relative difference of formant amplitudes. In clean speech, cepstral coefficients resulted in better classification. However, for test data from NTIMIT, acoustic phonetic‐based features outperformed cepstral coefficients, particularly if models were trained on clean speech. In addition, augmenting cepstral coefficients with acoustic phonetic‐based measurements resulted in the best performance. These findings suggest that cepstral coefficients are able to model speech in a given environment in finer detail, whereas acoustic phonetic‐based features are more robust to changes in environment, so that combining both types of measurements leads to the best performance.