The syntax of acoustic segments

The grouping of acoustic segments into syllables and words reflects a structural organization similar to that found at many higher levels of linguistics. Evidence from speech perception studies indicates that the human interpretation of an acoustic segment is a function of its position in the stream of speech segments. Speech synthesis programs use segment-combination rules that depend on the manner of production classes of the constituent segments. This paper reviews considerations for use of the syntactic approach in automatic segmental analysis of speech for speech recognition applications. We find that the segmentation and labeling processes are sufficiently strongly connected to make context-independent segmentation unlikely to prove successful in practice. Voicing and manner of production are the features under strongest syntactic constraint while segments differing in place of production can be more freely substituted.