Spectral variability at the transition between successive phonemes

In an experimental study of identification of truncated Japanese syllables it was stated that a short speech interval (approximately 10 ms) that includes the position of maximum spectral transition between a consonant and a vowel carries the most important information for the perception of the consonant and the syllable [S. Furui, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 80, 1016–1025 (1986)]. A reduced spectral variability at the transition position could partially explain the increase of information at this position. The current study investigates whether there is a decrease in spectral variability at the transition position between successive phonemes compared with the spectral variability at the phoneme centers. The training part of the TIMIT acoustic‐phonetic database, containing sentences in English from 462 American speakers, is used to build 2471 diphone models, based on the 61 symbols used in the database for phonetic transcription. The variability of the mel‐frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) is evaluated for v...