The voicing feature for stop consonants: acoustic phonetic analyses and automatic speech recognition experiments
We examine the distinctive feature [voice] that separates the voiced from the unvoiced sounds for the case of stop consonants. We conduct acoustic-phonetic analyses on a large database and demonstrate the superior separability using a temporal measure (voice onset time; VOT) rather than spectral measures. We describe several algorithms to estimate the VOT automatically from continuous speech and compare them on a speech recognition problem to reduce error rates by as much as 53 % over a baseline HMM based system.