Syllables play an important role in speech synthesis and recognition. We present several different approaches to the syllabification of phonemes. We investigate approaches based on linguistic theories of syllabification, as well as a discriminative learning technique that combines Support Vector Machine and Hidden Markov Model technologies. Our experiments on English, Dutch and German demonstra...

How should one syllabify medial homorganic nasal plus stop (-VNCV-) clusters in Hindi such as those in [] ‘tall’ and [] ‘pebble’? A variety of principles have been proposed by phonologists, the three most common ones being the ‘legality’ principle, ‘maximize onset’ principle, and the ‘sonority sequencing’ principle. In this paper we will attempt to show that all -VNCVclusters do not ...

We address the question of the relationship between two time series associated to the speech signal. The first one is the sonority function which was introduced in Galves et al. (2002) as an index of the local regularity of the speech signal. The second time series is the intra-oral pressure during the production of speech. We argue that the joint evolution of both time series can be well descr...

This study examines the effects of lexical stress on vowel quality in Iberian Spanish and Central Catalan and the relationship between phonetic variation caused by stress and speech rate. For Catalan, both absence of stress and fast speech rate result in a shrunken vowel space. For Spanish, the effects of speech rate are in line with those found for Catalan. Yet, unstressed vowels are character...

1. Introduction Early accounts of epenthesis in Optimality Theory focused on epenthesis that results from constraints on prosodic structure, that is, from syllable structure constraints or minimal prosodic category (e.g. minimal word) requirements. McCarthy & Prince (1993a) account for word-internal consonant epenthesis at V-V junctures in Axininca Campa, for example, by ranking ONSET (Syllable...

Several recent investigations of the development of left-edge clusters in West Germanic languages have demonstrated that the relative sonority of adjacent consonants plays a key role in children’s reduction patterns (e.g. Fikkert 1994, Gilbers & Den Ouden 1994, Chin 1996, Barlow 1997, Bernhardt & Stemberger 1998, Gierut 1999, Ohala 1999, Gnanadesikan this volume). These authors have argued that...