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Abstract:
Statistical analysis of a large, phonetically transcribed
corpus of spontaneous, American English dialogue suggests that an
important factor governing the production of spoken language is
the information associated with a given element (whether it be
feature, phone, syllable, word or phrase), and that it is
difficult to fully account for articulatory patterns (as inferred
from the acoustic signal) purely on the basis of biomechanical
factors. This entropic foundation of articulation is observed in
terms of the probability of canonical pronunciation relative to
the position within the syllable, as well as with respect to
speaking rate and frequency of lexical occurrence. Such patterns
of pronunciation variability imply that the phonetic realization
(and hence production) of spoken language is highly dependent on
the entropy associated with syllabic, lexical and phrasal
contexts, and thus it is likely that the production of
spontaneous speech is largely governed by mechanisms operating at
an exceedingly high level of linguistic organization.
For further information:
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~steveng
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~fosler
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