In a pilot study of phonetic modification of function words in 2 spontaneous speech dialogues, 99 utterances of the syllable /tu/ corresponding to the morphemes to, two, too, -to and to- included ten pronunciation variants. Factors influencing phonetic modification included phonetic context, prosody, part of speech, adjacent disfluency and individual speaker. 11% of the acoustic landmarks defining /t/ closure, /t/ release and vowel jaw opening maximum were not detectable in hand labelling. In a separate corpus, 59% of recognition errors involved grammatical or function words like conjunctions, articles, prepositions, pronouns and auxilliary verbs, and for 17 tokens of /tu/, half were misrecognized. Implications of these preliminary results for linguistic theory, cognitive modelling of speech processing and automatic speech recognition are discussed.
Cite as: Veilleux, N.M., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. (1998) Phonetic modification of the syllable /tu/ in two spontaneous american English dialogues. Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998), paper 0382, doi: 10.21437/ICSLP.1998-673
@inproceedings{veilleux98_icslp,
author={Nanette M. Veilleux and Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel},
title={{Phonetic modification of the syllable /tu/ in two spontaneous american English dialogues}},
year=1998,
booktitle={Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998)},
pages={paper 0382},
doi={10.21437/ICSLP.1998-673}
}