An Acoustic Analysis Of Fricatives Produced By Typically Developing Child And Adult Speakers Of Oromo.

The present study was aimed to investigate word initial and medial voiceless fricatives /f,rns, ʃ, h/ produced by typically developing children between the age of 3 and 6 and adultrnspeakers of Haraghe Oromo dialect. The study investigated whether fricatives wererndistinct as a function of noise duration, normalized amplitude, and spectral features. Thernwork included fricatives both in singleton and geminate forms. The word initial fricativesrnwere all in singleton form because word or syllable initial geminationation is notrnpermissible in Oromo. The extent to which the sounds vary as a function of vowelrncontext, speakers‟ age and gender in both phonetic contexts was investigated. Among thernparameters analyzed, fricative duration, normalized amplitude and the first three spectralrnmoments (spectral mean and spectral standard deviation and spectral skewness) werernmore effective to discriminate fricatives. But only the third spectral moment in the CVrnand VCV fricatives and the second spectral moment in the VCV fricatives distinguishedrnall fricatives in terms place of articulation. The spectral kurtosis was the least or almostrnnot robust cue to discriminate fricatives. Similarly, locus equation did not discriminaternfricatives. The result supports the claim that locus equation is not a salient acoustic cue torndistinguish fricatives.In the study anatomical, physiological and developmental or behavioral factors played roles to bring variations as a function of place, vowel, age and gender. Surprisingly, gender difference was observed at early age which has been speculated to be conditioned by developmental or behavioral factors. The difference between geminate and singleton fricatives was evident both in durational and spectral attributes indicating that the two phonemes vary temporally and physiologically. In the CV context the voiceless glottal fricative behaved predominantly like vocalic segments than consonants, especially in having highly elevated average measures of spectral skewness and kurtosis. Among all fricatives /s/ turned out to be the most resistant to coarticulation and the least to be classified by the linear discriminant analysis. This typical nature of the sound may indicate that it was the last to be acquired by children among the test fricatives.

Get Full Work

Report copyright infringement or plagiarism