Articulation and perception of the /t/ phoneme in a speech corpus of edentulous elderly adults wearing dental prostheses

Abstract

In this paper we present the main realizations of the /t/ phoneme in a speech corpus of Mexico City elderly adults with edentulism and wearing dental prostheses. Plosive, fricative and affricate realizations of the /t / phoneme with durations ranging from 23 milliseconds (ms) up to 271 ms, as well as second phase durations spanning 5 ms to 92 ms were observed. An analysis of the relevance of the acoustic features of this phoneme through a series of auditory perception tests revealed that, in most cases, /t/ was identified despite the modification or elision of the prototypical acoustic characteristics. It was particularly relevant that the decrease in the total duration of the stimulus did not affect the perception of /t/.