Observation and modelling of "Formant" transitions using ISASS

The rules for vocalic sound transitions usually consider a limited frequency range for each formant. Current acoustic knowledge of speech production allows us to give a different interpretation of vocalic sound transitions. This interpretation would explain the existence of the so-called "spurious" formants, the observed "asynchrony" between transitions, and the effects of coarticulation across consonants. We show as an example that the second formant of /w/ is transformed through the transition into the fourth formant of /i/ in the sequence /wi/; a result implied in K.N. STEVENS theoretical model (1). Implications for automatic speech pattern discrimination and synthesis are discussed.