2016从声音到语言英文版.pptVIP

From Sounds to Language CS 4706 Julia Hirschberg Who studies speech sounds? Phoneticians: What distinctive sounds do particular languages have? How are they produced? Phonologists: What is the underlying theory of speech sound? What explains how particular sounds vary in context? Acoustic phoneticians, speech engineers, speech pathologists, lexicographers, singers,… How do we represent speech sounds? Regular orthography Special-purpose symbol sets Abstract sound classes based upon sound similarities What sounds are shared by languages X and Y? What sounds are unique to particular languages? Or at least rare? E.g. for language identification Limits of Orthography A single letter may have many different acoustic realizations, e.g., in English o comb, tomb, bomb oo blood, food, good c court, center, cheese s reason, surreal, shy A single sound may have different orthographic correspondences [i] sea, see, scene, receive, thief [s] cereal, same, miss [u] true, few, choose, lieu, do [ay] prime, buy, rhyme, lie Orthography not a good choice Phonetic Symbol Sets International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) Single character for each sound Represents all sounds of the world’s languages ARPAbet, TIMIT, … Multiple characters for sounds but ASCII English specific, so new symbol sets for each new language to be represented Sound Categories Phone: Basic speech sound A minimal sound difference between two words (e.g. too, zoo) Not every human sound is phonetic, e.g. Sniffs, laughs, coughs,… Phoneme: Class of speech sounds Phoneme may include several phones (e.g. the /t/ in butter, trip, tip, but) Allophone: set of phonetic variants of a phoneme (e.g. a flapped t is an allophone of /t/) Articulatory Phonetics: How do people produce speech? General process: Air expelled from lungs through windpipe (trachea) leaving via mouth (mostly) and nose (nasals) (e.g. [m], [n]) Air passing thru trachea goes thru ‘voice box’ (larynx), which contains vocal cords (vocal folds) – space