Speech recognition, sylabification and statistical phonetics

The classical approach in phonetics of careful observation of individual utterances can, this paper contends, be usefully augmented with automatic statistical analyses of large amounts of speech. Such analyses, using methods derived from speech recognition, are shown to quantify several known phonetic phenomena, most of which require syllable structure to be taken into account, and reveal some apparently new phenomena. Practical speech recognition normally ignores syllable structure. This paper presents quantitative evidence that prevocalic and postvocalic consonants behave differently. It points out some ways in which current speech recognition can be improved by taking syllable boundaries into account.