Acoustic parameters for place of articulation identification and classification of Spanish unvoiced stops

The analysis of the acoustic parameters which best summarize the cues to phone discrimination for the language under consideration should be a previous step in acoustic-phonetic decoding, regardless of the methodology to be used. The Spanish language has not been widely analyzed from this point of view. This work deals with the acoustic discrimination of Spanish stop consonants. Our main goal was to find a reliable and reduced set of parameters for place of articulation identification of Spanish unvoiced stops. On the basis of the obtained parameters, two automatic classifiers were developed and tested. Only the acoustic features of the burst segment, automatically segmented from the speech waveform, were considered in the parameter estimation. The analysis of these features was carried out in both the time and frequency domains over a CV context corpus uttered by 6 speakers. In the first case, the classifier was designed as a procedural form. Alternatively, in the second case a statistical classifier was obtained from a previous automatic discriminant analysis of the parameters. Both classifiers were tested over a CV context corpus uttered by 40 new speakers not included in the analysis corpus, which resulted in a good rate of identification.