Speaker-specific information in the acoustic characteristics of English fricatives

There is still much to learn about speakers’ similarities and differences in the field of Forensic Phonetics, especially with respect to consonant acoustics. The present master’s thesis presents analyses of acoustic features of three sibilants /s, z, ʃ/ in British English. It focuses on analysing the static and dynamic features of those segments to see if they can cue speaker-specific information. The analyses have been carried out on twenty male speakers from the DyViS corpus. This research focuses on both static features (intensity, centre of gravity, standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis) and dynamic features (centre of gravity depending of F2 vowel onset and offset) from speaker-specific perspective. The results obtained demonstrate the high speaker-specificity of centre of gravity, standard deviation and intensity. However, we have to be careful with the last one, because it is dependent on the recording circumstances. As for skewness and kurtosis, they show speaker...Show moreThere is still much to learn about speakers’ similarities and differences in the field of Forensic Phonetics, especially with respect to consonant acoustics. The present master’s thesis presents analyses of acoustic features of three sibilants /s, z, ʃ/ in British English. It focuses on analysing the static and dynamic features of those segments to see if they can cue speaker-specific information. The analyses have been carried out on twenty male speakers from the DyViS corpus. This research focuses on both static features (intensity, centre of gravity, standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis) and dynamic features (centre of gravity depending of F2 vowel onset and offset) from speaker-specific perspective. The results obtained demonstrate the high speaker-specificity of centre of gravity, standard deviation and intensity. However, we have to be careful with the last one, because it is dependent on the recording circumstances. As for skewness and kurtosis, they show speaker-specificity for /z/, but results are weaker for /s/ and /ʃ/. This master’s thesis has shown that spectral and acoustic properties of the three sibilants analysed /s, z, ʃ/ in English present promising results regarding speaker-specificity.Show less

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Speaker-specific information in the acoustic characteristics of English fricatives