Characterization of Consonant Sounds Using Features Related to Place of Articulation

Speech sounds are classified into 5 classes, grouped based on place and manner of articulation: velar, palatal, retroflex, dental and labial. In this paper, an attempt has been made to explore the role of place of articulation and vocal tract length in characterizing the different class of speech sounds. Formants and vocal tract length available for the production of each class of sound are extracted from the region of transition from consonant burst to the rising profile of the immediate following vowel. These features along with their statistical variations are considered for the analysis. Based on the non-linear nature of the features Random Forest (RF) is used for the classification. From the results, it is observed that the proposed features are efficient in discriminating the class of consonants: velar and palatal, palatal and retroflex and palatal and labial sounds with an accuracy of 92.9%, 93.83 and 94.07 respectively.