Abstract
Traditionally, linguists distinguish true consonants (or: obstruents) along a three term manner of articulation dimension: stop, fricative, and affricate. In this paper we shall be concerned with the contrast between two of these categories: affricate versus fricative, as in the word pair chop — shop. This contrast has multiple acoustic cues, which are listed in table I:
Table I, acoustic cues involved in the affricate-fricative contrast
- (1)
Duration of the preconsonantal vowel (Isenberg, 1978)
- (2)
Decay rate of the preconsonantal vowel amplitude (Debrock, 1977)
- (3)
Duration of the pre-burst silent interval (e.g., Kuipers, 1955; Truby, 1955)
- (4)
Formant transitions of the preconsonantal vowel (Isenberg, 1978; Dorman, Raphael & Isenberg, 1980)
- (5)
Rise time of the friction noise amplitude (e.g., Gerstman, 1957)
- (6)
Duration of the friction noise (e.g., Gerstman, 1957)
- (7)
Rise time of the post-consonantal vowel amplitude (Debrock, 1977)
- (8)
Presence/absence of a release burst (Dorman et al., 1980)
I thank Peter Vroege for running the experiment described in this paper.
The waveform editing programme for the DEC Micro PDP-11/23 was developed in our laboratory by Ing. J.J.A. Pacilly and Drs. A.F.E. van der Horst.
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© 1987 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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van Heuven, V.J. (1987). Reversal of the Rise-Time Cue in the Affricate-Fricative Contrast: An Experiment on the Silence of Sound. In: Schouten, M.E.H. (eds) The Psychophysics of Speech Perception. NATO ASI Series, vol 39. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3629-4_13
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