Co‐occurrence of allophonic forms

Abstract

Recent analyses of the allophonic variants of phonemes in particular environments often seem to assume one or more of the following: (1) The proportions of variants encountered in a multispeaker sample represent an “irreducible” statistical component of phonology; (2) these proportions predict the likelihood of encountering these same allophones in new material; (3) the probability of encountering a particular allophone of some phoneme is independent of the observed allophones of other phonemes nearby. These related assumptions are questioned on theoretical and practical grounds, using transcribed data from 630 speakers reading two sample sentences. The frequencies of occurrence of all the allophones of certain phoneme tokens in the sample sentences were measured across all speakers; then the conditional co‐occurrence of all the allophones of certain phoneme pairs in the sample sentences were analyzed. For example, first the occurrence of a flap in the words “suit in” was counted across all speakers; then the occurrence of a flap in “suit in” was counted for only those speakers who deleted /t/ in “don't ask,” and so on. Comparing these two kinds of analysis has implications for theories of variation. The application co‐occurance analysis in speech recognition will be illustrated. [Work supported by DARPA.]