Acoustic cues of voiced and voiceless plosives for determining place of articulation

Speech signals from stop consonants with trailing vowels were analysed for cues consistent with their place of articulation. They were decomposed into periodic and aperiodic components by the pitch-scaled harmonic filter to improve the quality of the formant tracks, to which exponential trajectories were fitted to get robust formant loci at voice onset. Ensemble-average power spectra of the bursts exhibited dependence on place (and on vowel context for velar consonants), but not on voicing. By extrapolating the trajectories back to the release time, formant estimates were compared with spectral peaks, and connexions were made between these disparate acoustic cues.