Phonotactics

Phonotactics (from Ancient Greek phōnḗ "voice, sound" and taktikós "having to do with arranging") is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes. Phonotactics defines permissible syllable structure, consonant clusters and vowel sequences by means of phonotactic constraints. Phonotactic constraints are highly language-specific. For example, in Japanese, consonant clusters like /st/ do not occur. Similarly, the clusters /kn/ and /ɡn/ are not permitted at the beginning of a word in Modern English but are in German and Dutch (in which the latter appears as /ɣn/) and were permitted in Old and Middle English. In contrast, in some Slavic languages /l/ and /r/ are used alongside vowels as syllable nuclei. Syllables have the following internal segmental structure: Onset (optional) Rhyme (obligatory, comprises nucleus and coda): Nucleus (obligatory) Coda (optional) Both onset and coda may be empty, forming a vowel-only syllable, or alternatively, the nucleus can be occupied by a syllabic consonant. Phonotactics is known to affect second language vocabulary acquisition. English phonology#Phonotactics The English syllable (and word) twelfths /twɛlfθs/ is divided into the onset /tw/, the nucleus /ɛ/ and the coda /lfθs/; thus, it can be described as CCVCCCC (C = consonant, V = vowel). On this basis it is possible to form rules for which representations of phoneme classes may fill the cluster. For instance, English allows at most three consonants in an onset, but among native words under standard accents (and excluding a few obscure loanwords such as sphragistics), phonemes in a three-consonantal onset are limited to the following scheme: /s/ + stop + approximant: /s/ + /tʃ/ + /ɹ/ stream /s/ + /t/ + /j/ (not in most accents of American English) stew /s/ + /p/ + /j ɹ l/ sputum sprawl splat /s/ + /k/ + /j ɹ l w/ skew scream sclerosis squirrel This constraint can be observed in the pronunciation of the word blue: originally, the vowel of blue was identical to the vowel of cue, approximately [iw].

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Articulatory feature based continuous speech recognition using probabilistic lexical modeling

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Phonological studies suggest that the typical subword units such as phones or phonemes used in automatic speech recognition systems can be decomposed into a set of features based on the articulators used to produce the sound. Most of the current approaches ...

Elsevier2016

Syllabic Pitch Tuning for Neutral-to-Emotional Voice Conversion

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Prosody plays an important role in both identification and synthesis of emotionalized speech. Prosodic features like pitch are usually estimated and altered at a segmental level based on short windows of speech (where the signal is expected to be quasi-sta ...

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Joint Phoneme Segmentation Inference and Classification using CRFs

Ronan Collobert, Dimitri Palaz

State-of-the-art phoneme sequence recognition systems are based on hybrid hidden Markov model/artificial neural networks (HMM/ANN) framework. In this framework, the local classifier, ANN, is typically trained using Viterbi expectation-maximization algorith ...

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Gemination

In phonetics and phonology, gemination (ˌdʒɛmᵻˈneɪʃən), or consonant lengthening (from Latin geminatio 'doubling', itself from gemini 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from stress. Gemination is represented in many writing systems by a doubled letter and is often perceived as a doubling of the consonant. Some phonological theories use 'doubling' as a synonym for gemination, while others describe two distinct phenomena.

Consonant cluster

In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups /spl/ and /ts/ are consonant clusters in the word splits. In the education field it is variously called a consonant cluster or a consonant blend. Some linguists argue that the term can be properly applied only to those consonant clusters that occur within one syllable. Others claim that the concept is more useful when it includes consonant sequences across syllable boundaries.

Rhotic consonant

In phonetics, rhotic consonants, or "R-like" sounds, are liquid consonants that are traditionally represented orthographically by symbols derived from the Greek letter rho, including , in the Latin script and , in the Cyrillic script. They are transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet by upper- or lower-case variants of Roman , : r, ɾ, ɹ, ɻ, ʀ, ʁ, ɽ, and ɺ. Transcriptions for vocalic or semivocalic realisations of underlying rhotics include the ə and ɐ.