Location of phonemic boundaries

[Richard Warren <rmwarren@xxxxxxx>]

Dear List,

     Jim Miller pointed out on 8 August that “It is well established  
that the acoustic information used by a listener to identify a  
consonant or a vowel is overlapping and distributed acoustically  
across a considerable span of time.”  He indicated that although some  
have attempted to identify the acoustic locations of consonants and  
vowels in running speech, they have for the most part failed since  
coarticulation extends well into adjacent phonemes.  But if the  
question is changed from “acoustic” boundaries to “perceptual”  
boundaries, the task becomes rather easy.

      When a sentence is abruptly terminated, the last speech sound  
is easily perceived.  By using an arbitrary starting point before the  
beginning of a recorded sentence, and moving the time of the cutoff  
through the sentence, it is easy to map the perceptual beginning and  
end of each phoneme within a few milliseconds.  We have been using  
this procedure for several decades.