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A visual feedback of the place of articulation is considered to be useful for speech training aids for hearing-impaired children and for learners of second languages in helping them in improving pronunciation. For such applications, the relation between place of articulation of fricatives and their spectral characteristics is investigated using English fricatives available in the XRMB database, which provides simultaneously acquired speech signal and articulogram. Place of articulation is estimated from the articulogram as the position of maximum constriction in the oral cavity, using an automated graphical technique. The magnitude spectrum is smoothed by critical band based median and mean filters for improving the consistency of the spectral parameters. Out of several spectral parameters investigated, spectral moments and spectral slope appear to be related to the place of articulation of the fricative segment of the utterances as measured from articulogram. The data are used to train and test a Gaussian mixture model to estimate the place of articulation with spectral parameters as the inputs. The estimated values showed a good match with those obtained from the articulograms.