Abstract: A fricative and affricate classification method based on articulatory characteristic was proposed. According to this method, the speech segment energy distributions and spectrum statistical features were first got based upon Seneff's auditory spectrum,and the differences of them were well described. Then fricative and affricate classification was achieved using the support vector machine model. The experimental results show that the class$ication accuracy is 90. 08% for clean speech, 80. 4% for noisy speech with the SNR of 5dB. Compared with the traditional timcfrequcncy energy distribution features based fricative and affricate classification methods, the proposed method gets great performance improvement under low SNR.

Key words: Fricative and affricate classification, Articulatory characteristic, Spectrum statistical, Seneff auditory model