Fricative consonant

Abstract: Recent data strongly suggest that six‐month‐olds perceive a similarity between vowels produced by different sized vocal tracts [P. K. Kuhl, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 61, S39(A) (1977)]. This study investigates the extent to which infants recognize phonetic similarity for a fricative consonant when it occurs in different vowel environments and is spoken by different talkers. Six‐month‐olds were tested in a discrimination task in which fricative contrasts (/f/ versus /θ/;/s/ versus /∫/) were examined in both the initial and final positions of naturally produced monosyllables. Infants were tested in a task in which a head turn was reinforced with a visual stimulus in the presence of an exemplar from one consonant category but not in the presence of an exemplar from the second consonant category. Infants were initially trained to differentiate a single exemplar from each of the two categories; then, the number of exemplars in each of the two categories was systematically increased until each category contained 12 different tokens (4 talkers × 3 vowel contexts). Results suggest that infants are capable of recognizing phonetic similarity for consonant categories. A video tape of the testing will be shown. [Research supported by NICHD.]

Abstract: An aerodynamic investigation of the occurrence of intrusive stop consonants occurring in nasal-fricative consonant clusters in English revealed that intrusive stops were cued perceptually by silent gaps often followed by burst releases preceding the fricative consonant. In articulatory-aerodynamic terms, intrusive stops appear to result from a prolonged oral occlusion of the nasal stop which is released with a vigorous burst release just prior to complete formation of the following fricative slit constriction.

Abstract: This paper reports on measurements of several acoustic attributes of the fricative consonant /s/ produced in word-initial position by normally speaking adults and by speakers with neuromotor dysfun...

Abstract: The present study is concerned with an electropalatographic (EPG) and acoustic analysis of coarticulatory influences in fricative consonant clusters that span a word boundary. We aimed to test whether, as has been found for other languages and consonant-classes, final consonants are more prone to coarticulatory influences than initial ones, and also whether there is any evidence for a relationship between a consonant’s susceptibility to coarticulation and the extent to which it exerts a coarticulatory influence on flanking consonants. We developed an algorithm, the similarity index (SI), which quantifies coarticulation in EPG data by measuring the extent of deviation of consonants in heterorganic clusters from their homorganic counterparts. This algorithm was applied to EPG data recorded from three native speakers of Polish producing word-pairs in a carrier sentence such that word-final and word-initial fricatives occurred across a word-boundary for all 16 possible combinations of the four fricatives [ ]. The same data were analysed acoustically using Bark-scaled cepstral coefficients. The results showed that word-final consonants were more susceptible to coarticulatory influences than were initial ones; and there was some evidence that the alveolopalatal fricative [ ] was most resistant to coarticulation, and exerted the greatest coarticulatory influences.