Acoustic features for detection of phonemic aspiration in voiced plosives

Plosives in Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi and Marathi display a 4-way contrast involving the two dimensions of voicing and aspiration. While many studies are available on the acoustics of aspiration in unvoiced stops due to their more universal presence in the world’s languages, voiced aspirated plosives have been less studied. Rather than the release duration cue of aspiration in unvoiced stops, the acoustic realization of aspiration in voiced plosives is marked by the coarticulatory breathiness of the following vowel. We consider the automatic detection of aspiration in Marathi word-initial voiced stops and affricates via several features relating to extent and timing of breathiness of the following vowel. The effectiveness of the features is evaluated by classification performance on a database of Marathi words. A practical application of this work to the detection of non-native pronunciation of voiced obstruents is presented.