The bursts of stops can convey dialectal information

Abstract

This study investigates the effects of the dialect of the speaker on the spectral properties of stop bursts. Forty-five female speakers—20 Standard Modern Greek and 25 Cypriot Greek speakers—participated in this study. The spectral properties of stop bursts were calculated from the burst spectra and analyzed using spectral moments. The findings show that besides linguistic information, i.e., the place of articulation and the stress, the speech signals of bursts can encode social information, i.e., the dialects. A classification model using decision trees showed that skewness and standard deviation have a major contribution for the classification of bursts across dialects.