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14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
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14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
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This paper investigates spontaneous speech in Japanese,
particularly phonetic phenomena that do not normally occur in
carefully pronounced formal speech. I discuss several
pronunciation variations in a corpus, including reduction or
deletion of both vowels and consonants.
In this study, I also analyzed a specific speech utterance, which
has a combination of some of those pronunciation variations, in
detail. It was often difficult to identify each segment in the
utterance solely by listening to just the few segments themselves
(micro-listening), even if listening to the entire phrase (macrolistening)
sounded intelligible. I conducted a perceptual
experiment using this utterance; the results showed that the same
speech segment was perceived as two morae by micro-listening and
as five morae by macro-listening.
Listeners use a combination of temporal and contextual cues to
reconstruct a speaker's intentions, although the phenomena found
in spontaneous speech show that phonetic segments may change
their appearance.
Bibliographic reference. Arai, Takayuki (1999): "A case study of spontaneous speech in Japanese", In ICPhS-14, 615-618.