New classification method of place of articulation of consonants in connected speech using formants

This paper describes a new method for classifying the place of articulation of consonants in connected speech. The locus theory was proposed by the workers of the Haskins Laboratories, but actual second formant frequencies observed at the onset of consonant-vowel transitions in connected speech depend on the acoustic environment and the speaker. Therefore, formant normalization and coarticulation-modeling techniques are necessary to classify consonants. This paper proposes the effective methods of speaker adaptation and modeling of coarticulation.