SPEAKER SPECIFIC INFORMATION IN THE ACOUSTIC CHARACTERISTICS OF ENGLISH FRICATIVES

Abstract

 There is still much to learn about speakers’ similarities and differences in the field of Forensic 
Phonetics with respect to consonant acoustics. This article analyses of acoustic features of three sibilants /s, z, ʃ/  in British English. The analyses have been carried out on twenty male speakers from the DyViS corpus  focusing on static features (intensity, centre of gravity, standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis) and dynamic  features (centre of gravity depending on F2 vowel onset and offset) to see if they cue speaker-specific  information. The results obtained demonstrate the high speaker-specificity of centre of gravity, standard  deviation and intensity. However, we must be careful with intensity because it depends on the recording  circumstances. As for skewness and kurtosis, they show speaker-specificity for /z/, but results are weaker the  other two. This article has shown that spectral and acoustic properties of these three sibilants in English present  promising results.