Fricative-affricate continuum

Several studies have found that the duration of frication is the primary cue for fricative and affricate identification (Howell et al.,1983; Kluender and Walsh 1992; Mitani et al., 2006; Amano et al., 2011, Yasu et al. 2013). When the duration of frication ($C$) is longer, identification shifts to fricatives from affricates.

When preceded by a vowel $V_{1}$, the interval of silence ($SI$) between $V_{1}$ and a fricative become a cue for identification (Yasu et al., 2013; Repp, 1978; Dorman et al., 1980; Goldon-Salant et al.,2006).
Longer $SI$ tends toward the perception of an affricate.

In this demonstration, $SI$ between $V_{1}$ and $C$ was set to the range of 0-100 ms in 10 ms steps (11 steps). The length of $C$ is fixed to 180 ms

SI (ms) 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Sound
SI (ms) V1 only CV2 only
Sound
  • P. Howell and S. Rosen, “Production and perception of rise time in the voiceless affricate/fricative distinction,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 73(3):976–984, 1983.
  • Kluender, K. R. and Walsh, M. A. “Amplitude rise time and the perception of the voiceless affricate/fricative distinction,” Percept. Psychophys., 51(4):328–333, 1992.
  • Mitani, S., Kitama, T. and Sato, Y., “Voiceless affricate/fricative distinction by frication duration and amplitude rise slope,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 120(3):1600–1607, 2006.
  • Amano S. and Yamakawa, K., “Perception and production boundaries between fricative [s] and affricate [ts] in Japanese,” Proc. of ICPhS XVII, Hong Kong, 228–231, 2011.
  • Yasu, K., Arai, T., Kobayashi, K., Shindo, M., “Weighting of acoustic cues shifts to frication duration in identification of fricatives/affricates when auditory properties are degraded due to aging,” Proc. of INTERSPEECH2013, Lyon, France, 2013 (to be published).
  • Repp, B. H., Liberman, A. M., Eccardt, T. and Pesetsky, D., “Perceptual integration of acoustic cues for stop, fricative, and affricate manner,” J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform., 4(4):621–637, 1978.
  • Dorman, M. F., Raphael, L. J. and Isenberg, D., “Acoustic cues for a fricative-affricate contrast in word-final position,” J. Phonetics, 8:394–405, 1980.
  • Gordon-Salant, S., Yeni-Komshian, G. H., Fitzgibbons, P. J. and Barrett, J., “Age-related differences in identification and discrimination of temporal cues in speech segments,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 119(4):2455–2466, 2006.