Implications of Acoustic Variation for the Segmentation of the Czech Trill /r/

摘要

The Czech alveolar sonorant trill /r/, like liquids generally, constitutes a challenge from the point of view of locating its boundaries in the acoustic stream. As it is desirable to label and segment a phonetic corpus uniformly and also to facilitate a high degree of inter-labeller agreement, rules for specifying speechsound boundaries should be unambiguous and as straightforward as possible. In this study, we examined various acoustic forms of Czech /r/ - from the trill and a flap to strongly reduced instances - and their implications for segmentation. The above-mentioned requirements resulted in the necessity to treat the segmentation of intervocalic items of /r/ differently from items occurring in consonant clusters.