Obstruent voiced obstruents are common. This contrasts with sonorants, which are prototypically voiced and only rarely voiceless. Obstruent An obstruent is a speech sound such as , , or that is formed by "obstructing" airflow. Obstruents contrast with sonorants, which have no such obstruction and so resonate. All obstruents are consonants, but sonorants include both vowels and consonants. Obstruents are subdivided into plosives (oral stops), such as , with complete occlusion of the vocal tract, often followed by a release burst; fricatives, such as , with limited closure, not stopping airflow but making it turbulent; and affricates, which begin with complete
Gnuspeech Gnuspeech Gnuspeech is an extensible text-to-speech computer software package that produces artificial speech output based on real-time articulatory speech synthesis by rules. That is, it converts text strings into phonetic descriptions, aided by a pronouncing dictionary, letter-to-sound rules, and rhythm and intonation models; transforms the phonetic descriptions into parameters for a low-level articulatory speech synthesizer; uses these to drive an articulatory model of the human vocal tract producing an output suitable for the normal sound output devices used by various computer operating systems; and does this at the same or faster rate than the speech is spoken for adult speech.