Recognition of Consonants and Inhomogeneous Vowels from the Transitional Segments of Vowels

The article is a study of the initial transitional segments of vowels occurring after voiceless consonants and voiced stops; the experimental material was 5140 utterances of 406 words and involved the participation of 70 speakers. The parameters of the segments were isolated automatically. The mean values of the first two formant frequencies of the transitional and quasi-stationary segments of vowels combined with 11 hard and ten soft consonants were obtained and are given in tables. Features are established for distinguishing hard and soft consonants and for determining the place of formation of hard consonants in terms of the transitional segment of the following vowels; features for recognizing the soft variants of vowels were also established. Values of the loci were obtained for labials and dentals.