Acoustic Characteristics of English Fricatives: I. Static Cues

To date, no single metric has been able to classify place of articulation for all English fricatives with
a high degree of accuracy. This paper constitutes a first report on a large-scale study of acoustic cues
for classification of place of articulation in fricatives and focuses on static cues: spectral peak
location, noise duration, and noise amplitude.

While all three static properties of fricatives investigated in this study served to distinguish sibilant from non-sibilant fricatives, the present results indicate that a measure of noise amplitude serves to distinguish all four places of fricative articulation.

This finding suggests that static acoustic properties can provide robust information about all four places of articulation, despite variation in speaker, vowel context, and voicing.