Closure duration and VOT of word-initial voiceless plosives in English in spontaneous connected speech

Abstract This is a corpus study on closure duration and VOT in English voiceless stops in word-initial position. 19 speakers’ (10 female, 9 male) data from the Buckeye Speech corpus are used in the study. The first half of the paper introduces a novel approach of automatically finding the point of stop release in large speech database, using Mel spectral templates and similarity scores. The performance and robustness of the algorithm is discussed in detail. To our knowledge, this is also the first automatic measure of closure duration and VOT that is reported in detail in the literature. The second half of the paper studies the closure duration and VOT as calculated by the procedure described in the first half, and investigate the correlation between these durations and a number of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors.