Transitions in Fricative Noise

The terminal‐analog speech synthesizer at the Phonetics Department of Edinburgh University is used for work on the specification of speech sounds by means of acoustic parameters. Problems arising during the synthesis of passages of connected speech frequently lead to experiments in acoustic‐phonetic detail. In one of these, the cues to the place of articulation of stops in clusters of the type fricative‐stop‐fricative, as in e.g., “clasps,” have been studied. It appears that transitional movements in the frequency position of the energy peak in the hiss spectrum used for the fricatives may be a cue for the place of articulation of the stop, parallelling formant movements in vowels as cues to the places of articulation of neighboring stops.