Subject: Re: Location of phonemic boundaries From: Athanassios Protopapas <protopap@xxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 01:03:23 +0300 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>But the phonemes are still overlapping, aren' they? That is to say, the perceptual beginning of each phoneme typically precedes the perceptual end of at least one previous phoneme. Therefore, this procedure may help identify reliably some points in time meeting specific criteria, but does not help segment time into individual phonemes. And the extent of overlap varies quite substantially, depending on phonemes, speaker, conditions, tempo etc. Right? On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 7:42 PM, Richard Warren <rmwarren@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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. >