Mandarin is a syllable-timed language whose syllable structure is quite simple [1]. In spontaneous Mandarin, because of rapid speech rate the structure of syllable may be changed, phonemes may be reduced and syllable boundaries as well as lexical tones may be merged. This fact has long been noticed, but no quantified empirical data were actually presented in the literature until now. This paper...

An approach to automatic detection of syllable structure is presented. We demonstrate a novel application of EM-based clustering to multivariate data, exempli ed by the induction of 3and 5-dimensional probabilistic syllable classes. The qualitative evaluation shows that the method yields phonologically meaningful syllable classes. We then propose a novel approach to grapheme-to-phoneme conversi...

An approach to automatic detection of syllable structure is presented. We demonstrate a novel application of EM-based clustering to multivariate data, exempliied by the induction of 3-and 5-dimensional probabilistic syllable classes. The 3-dimensional models were subjected to a pseudo-disambiguation task, the result of which shows that the onset is the most variable, or least predictable, part ...

A production study was conducted to investigate the effect of focus on the temporal structure of Swedish two-syllable words. Speakers read aloud simple three-word sentences with systematic variation of the position of focus in the syntactic structure. All the words in each sentence had the same word accent, either acute or grave and they were all two-syllable non-compounds. In general, focus on...

This study investigated the processes underlying the effect of masked syllable priming in French with pseudoword primes and word targets. Two lexical-decision task (LDT) experiments examined whether the syllable priming effect depends on syllable frequency and might rely on a general abstract structure. The results of Experiment 1 revealed an inhibitory priming effect, with pseudoword primes an...