SPEAKER NORMALIZATION OF FRICATIVE NOISE: CONSIDERATIONS ON LANGUAGE-SPECIFIC CONTRAST

Martine Toda
ENST/LTCI UMR 5141, CNRS

ID 1550
[full paper]

Both frication noise and vowel formants cue the place of articulation of sibilant fricatives (e.g., /s/ and /sh/ in English).However, only few studies have examined the effect of speaker-specific factors. This acoustic study of sibilant fricatives examines how speaker-specific formant information can improve the distinctness of two phonemic categories of sibilants: /s/ vs. /sh/ in French and /s/ vs. /sj/ in Japanese. The results show that the center of gravity of the frication noise, normalized with respect to the subject-specific coefficient of vowel onset or vowel center formants, in overall provide an appreciable improvement in the sibilant distinctness. While the distinctness score of the subject-normalized noise is generally higher in French than in Japanese, the F2 onset patterns (/s/