Effect of Frication Duration and Formant Transitions on the Perception of Fricatives in VCV Utterances

Place perception for fricatives is reported to be determined by the spectral characteristics of the frication segment and also by the formant transitions in case of non-sibilants. A study is conducted to investigate the relative importance of the transitions and the frication duration on the perception of the unvoiced fricatives /f, s, sh/. Listening tests for consonant identification were conducted using vowel-fricative-vowel sequences, generated using the vowel and transition segments extracted from natural utterances and the frication segments synthesized with duration of 30-300 ms. The test results showed that the sequences with frication duration of 50 ms and larger were identified as fricatives, with the place determined by a combination of the transition and frication segments. The place perception for sequences with transition corresponding to /f/ was not affected by the frication segments, while that for sequences with transitions corresponding to /s/ and /sh/ was dominated by the frication segments. The findings indicate that estimation of the place of articulation of fricatives may be improved by combining the information from the transition and frication segments.