• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.45-53
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• 2015

The current study investigated CVCC syllables in spontaneous American English speech to find out whether such syllables are produced as phonological units with a string of segments, showing a hierarchical structure. Transcribed data from the Buckeye Speech Corpus was used for the analysis in this study. The result of the current study showed that the constituents within a CVCC syllable as a phonological unit may have phonetic variations (namely, the final coda may undergo deletion). First, voiceless alveolar stops were the most frequently deleted when they occurred as the second final coda consonants of a CVCC syllable; this deletion may be an intermediate process on the way from the abstract form CVCC (with the rime VCC) to the actual pronunciation CVC (with the rime VC), a production strategy employed by some individual speakers. Second, in the internal structure of the rime, the proportion of deletion of the final coda consonant depended on the frequency of the word rather than on the position of postvocalic consonants on the sonority hierarchy. Finally, the segment following the consonant cluster proved to have an effect on the reduction of that cluster; more precisely, the following contrast was observed between obstruents and non-obstruents, reflecting the effect of sonority: when the segment following the consonant cluster was an obstruent, the proportion of deletion of the final coda consonant was increased. Among these results, the effect of word frequency played a critical role for promoting the deletion of the second coda consonant for clusters in CVCC syllables in spontaneous speech. The current study implies that the structure of syllables as phonological units can vary depending on individual speakers' lexical representation.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.21 no.7
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• pp.656-664
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• 2002

We present a statistical analysis of Korean phonological variations using a Grapheme-to-Phoneme (GPT) system. The GTP system used for experiments generates pronunciation variants by applying rules modeling obligatory and optional phonemic changes and allophonic changes. These rules are derived form morphophonological analysis and government standard pronunciation rules. The GTP system is optimized for continuous speech recognition by generating phonetic transcriptions for training and constructing a pronunciation dictionary for recognition. In this paper, we describe Korean phonological variations by analyzing the statistics of phonemic change rule applications for the 60,000 sentences in the Samsung PBS Speech DB. Our results show that the most frequently happening obligatory phonemic variations are in the order of liaison, tensification, aspirationalization, and nasalization of obstruent, and that the most frequently happening optional phonemic variations are in the order of initial consonant h-deletion, insertion of final consonant with the same place of articulation as the next consonants, and deletion of final consonant with the same place of articulation as the next consonant's, These statistics can be used for improving the performance of speech recognition systems.