Cross-language merged speech units and their descriptive phonetic correlates

The focus of this paper is to formulate an approach to merging phonemes across languages and to evaluate the resulting crosslanguage merged speech units on the basis of the traditional acousticphonetic descriptions of the phonemes. The methodology is based on the belief that some phonemes across a set of languages may be similar enough to be equated, contrasting traditional phonology which treats phonemes from one language independent from phonemes from another language. The identification of cross-language speech units is performed by an iterative data-driven procedure, which merges acoustically similar phonemes from within one language as well as across languages. The paper interprets a number of merged speech units on the basis of articulatory descriptions.