Phonetic Modification of Function Words: Implications for Human and Automatic Speech Processing

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Shattuck-Hufnagel & Stevens98-20126AbstractIn this study we will survey the function words (grammatical words like articles, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, pronouns, prepositions etc.) in a corpus of naturally occurring American English speech which has been labelled both phonetically and prosodically, and inventory the way the pronunciation of these words varies in normal speech. This will allow us to test the hypothesis that the phonetic variation of these words is influenced by prosodic structure such as intonational phrasing and pitch accenting.Function words are particularly prone to phonetic modification compared with content words like nouns, verbs and adjectives; see for example ``doncha'' for ``don't you'', ``givem'' for ``give him'', and ``mishu'' for ``miss you''. Although these changes may not seem systematic, we believe they can be described by a relative small number of rules applied to just a few representational structures. For example, results of a pilot study of the function word ``to'' suggest that its modifications are strongly influenced by the distinctive features of the preceding context, the form class of the function word, and the prosody of the spoken utterance. A better understanding of what can happen to function words in running speech will result in improved linguistic theories, cognitive processing models and techniques for automatic speech recognition and synthesis.