American Stops

An analysis of oral and nasal stops, affricates, oral and nasal flaps, and glottal stops was conducted using data from the TIMIT database. The results offer descriptions of the frequency of these segments in the large TIMIT corpus, mean segmental durations, voice onset times, and certain effects of voicing, place, word position, and speaker sex. Because of the quantity and diversity of speech data included, this study provides a characterization of American English stops which represents an overview of American speakers' production of these consonants in read materials. The results obtained are considered with respect to standard descriptions in the field which have generally used datasets which are smaller both with respect to context variability and speaker pool.