What is commonly considered as an epenthetic vowel can actually refer to at least two different realities: phonological epenthesis or phonetic excrescence. French schwa, noted [ә], a alternating with zero and limited unstressed syllables that appear word-internally word-finally. This paper presents extensive description of the distribution word-final schwa in Standard order shed light on its na...

Languages are subject to phonotactic constraints — restrictions on sound sequences. An implicit learning paradigm examined whether participants could acquire constraints at two levels of representation through exposure to a set of nonwords. Participants were exposed to categorical segment-level constraints (e.g., /f/ only in onset, /s/ only in coda) as well as gradient featural-level constraint...

This article surveys the major topics of Caucasian phonetics and phonology focusing on those aspects that bear broader implications for general phonetics and phonological theory. The article first presents an acoustic phonetic treatment of phonemic inventories in the three Caucasian families that involves both a review of recent instrumental data on the topic as well as a new analysis of experi...

The durational patterns between short and long vowels were investigated at the segmental and lexical level using four different word structures in Japanese, Finnish and Czech. The results confirmed that the Japanese segmental ratios between short and long vowels were longer than in Finnish and Czech; the Czech durational ratios in the second syllable were longer than those in the first syllable...

This paper deals with rhythmic modeling and its application to language identification. Beside phonetics and phonotactics, rhythm is actually one of the most promising features to be considered for language identification, but significant problems are unresolved for its modeling. In this paper, an algorithm dedicated to rhythmic segmentation is described. Experiments are performed on read speec...

Especially in recognition of spontaneous speech it is necessary to cope with the occurrence of unknown words. We present an approach to unknown word detection which is integrated into a standard HMM speech recognizer. From the context dependent sub-word units, e.g. triphones, that can be found in the training database a generic word model can be derived automatically using the context restricti...

Romanian phonology is shown to be subject to inflection dependence, a systematic restriction on phonological alternations. Inflection dependence means that segmental alternations are permitted in the derivatives of a lexeme only if certain inflected forms of that lexeme, its inflectional bases (Albright 2002), independently display the alternation. The study documents this pervasive constraint ...