An acoustic study of the strength of Persian fricatives in different phonetic and prosodic contexts

This research addresses the strength of fricative consonants in Persian continuous speech. Data were designed such that Persian voiced and voiceless fricatives were placed in three different consonantal positions, namely word initial, intervocalic word medial and word final. Also, the fricative consonants differed with respect to context (voiced vs. voiceless) as well as lexical stress (stressed vs. unstressed). Duration, intensity of the low formant frequencies and intensity of the mid to high formant frequencies of the target segments were measured. Results indicated that values of duration and intensity of the mid to high frequencies systematically vary in different phonetic and stress contexts as well as different consonantal positions. More specifically, the results showed that Persian fricatives have longer duration and greater intensity in the mid to high frequencies when placed in voiceless and stressed contexts and intervocalic position.