Phonological Processing of Speech Variants

This paper describes a strategy for the extension of the phonological lexicon in order that nonstandard forms which arise in fast speech may be processed by a speech recognition system. By way of illustration, an outline of the phonological processing of standard wordforms by the phonological parser (PhoPa) is given and then the extension procedure which is based on this phonological parser is discussed. The lexicon extension procedure has two stages: phonotactic extension which involves the introduction of additional restrictions into the phonotactic network for the standard language in the form of metarules describing phonological processes, and specialised word model construction whereby for each standard phonemic wordforrn a verification net which contains all variants of this standard form is compiled. The complete system serves as a phonologically oriented lexicon development tool, and its theoretical interest lies in its contribution to the field of speech variant learning.