Spectral Moments of Fricative Consonants in Serbian (an Account of Female Speakers’ Production)

This paper deals with the measurement of spectral moments of Serbian fricatives. The four spectral moments: centre of gravity, spectral variance, skewness, and kurtosis were measured at the onset of the fricative, on the stable-state part and at the fricative offset. The results show that the highest values for the centre of gravity can be found in non-sibilants, except for the sound [v]. The measurements were taken in both Hertz and Bark scales, and the results show that the Bark scale serves better in distinguishing fricative types. The energy which is generated during the fricatives' production is not evenly allocated in the time-course of the fricative length. Voiced and voiceless fricatives differ in force of articulation within the fricative duration. The greatest factor effects were found to be the place of articulation and phonological voicing. The vowel that follows does not statistically influence the spectral moments’ values, except for the difference in fricative [x] which surfaces as an acoustically different segment before the vowels [i] and [u].