Sonority Contours in Speech Recognition

for their invaluable input into this paper. All errors are my own. The sonority scale that ranks phonemes according to relative " loudness " has long played a significant role in the fields of Phonology and Historical Linguistics, yet it is conspicuously absent from the speech recognition literature. In this preliminary study using the Hoosier Mental Lexicon, it was found that approximately half of the 20,000 words in the lexicon have unique sonority contours. Moreover, it was found that there is no correlation between " sorority " (group of words that share a single sonority contour) size and either word frequency or familiarity. Each sorority is indistinguishable from a random sample of words with respect to these two criteria. This implies that sonority contours may constitute an independent factor in word recognition that may have effects analogous to frequency. Sororities may also have implications for defining word neighborhoods.