A concurrent approach to the automatic extraction of subsegmental primes and phonological constituents from speech

摘要

We demonstrate the feasibility of using unary primes in speech-driven language processing. Proponents of Government Phonology (one of several phonological frameworks in which speech segments are represented as combinations of relatively few subsegmental primes) claim that primes are acoustically realisable. This claim is examined critically searching out signatures for primes in multispeaker speech signal data. In response to a wide variation in the ease of detection of primes, it is proposed that the computational approach to phonology-based, speech-driven software should be organised in stages. After each stage, computational processes like segmentation and lexical access can be launched to run concurrently with later stages of prime detection.