Closure duration analysis of incomplete stop consonants due to stop-stop interaction.

An incomplete stop consonant is characterized either by an indistinguishable closure or a missing burst. If an incomplete stop happens due to a stop following another stop [stop-stop interaction (SSI)], its acoustics typically resemble that of a complete stop-one closure followed by a single burst. As a consequence, stop detectors would fail to distinguish an SSI from a complete stop. Analysis of the TIMIT corpus shows 35.04% incomplete stops (14.97% SSI). It is shown that by using automatically estimated (and hand-labeled) closure duration, complete stops can be distinguished from incomplete stops due to SSI with 69.66% (79.14%) accuracy.