The prosodic structure of initial syllables in English
نویسندگان
چکیده
Studies of human continuous-speech recognition suggest that Iistencrs use a strategy of postulating a word boundary, and initiating a lexical access procedure, at each metrically strong syllable. The likely success of this strategy was here estimated against the characteristics of the English vocabulary. Computerised dictionaries of Engtish were found to Iist approximately three times as many words beginning with strong syllables ( i.e. syllahles containing a full vowel) as beginning with weak syllables ( i.e. syllables containing a reduced vowel). Furthermore, the mean frequency of occurrence of words beginning with strong syllables is nearly t wice as great as that of words beginning with weak syllables. These findings motivated an estimate for everyday speech recognition that approximately 85% of lexical words ( i.e. excluding function words) will begin with strong syllables. ln fact, in a !arge corpus of spontaneaus conversation 90% of lexical words were found to begin with strong syllables.
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