Phonetic modification of the syllable /tu/ in two spontaneous american English dialogues

Abstract

In a pilot study of phonetic modi cation of function words in 2 spontaneous speech dialogues, 99 utterances of the syllable /tu/ corresponding to to, two, too, -to and toincluded the pronunciation variants [t h u, t h , D , d , n , s , s, t h , , t h ]. Factors in uencing phonetic modi cation included phonetic context, prosody, part of speech, adjacent dis uency and individual speaker. 11% of the acoustic landmarks de ning /t/ closure, /t/ release and vowel jaw opening maximumwere 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.