British Dialects Book

[Mark A Mandel]

On Sat, 21 Sep 2002, Dennis R. Preston wrote:

#>Of course it would. As long as that means yhat nobody pronounces
#>phonemes (only phones).
#
#I don't understand, however, why "phone" and "phoneme" wouldn't do
#for any speech recognition (or production) computational attempts? I
#say the phones
#[ha:], and, if you're good, you build a machine which recognizes the
#word "hi" on the basis of some sort of pan-dialectal phonemic
#representation (presumably something like /haI/ which represents the
#morpheme {hi}. I don't really see the need for a 'pron.'

/h/ is a phoneme. /h 'aI/ is a pron. As you train the program
initially and continue to use it, the /'aI/ phoneme gets adapted to your
pronunciation [a:] and the program gets better and better at recognizing
your speech.

Clearer now?

-- Mark A. Mandel
   formerly Sr. Linguist, Dragon Systems, speech recognition