Cowan defines a chunk as “a collection of concepts that have strong associations to one another and much weaker associations to other chunks currently in use.” This definition does not impose any constraints on the nature and number of elements that can be bound into a chunk. We present an experiment to demonstrate that such limitations exist for visual short-term memory, and that their analysis may lead to important insights into properties of visual memory.
The subject of this paper is a rule corpus of approx.1500 phonetic rules that models segmental variation of pronunciation in German connected speech. The phonetic rules express on a broad-phonetic level phenomena of phonetic reduction in German that occur within words and across word boundariesThe rule corpus bas been designed as a component of the Munich Automatic Segmentation System (MAUS), which is an HMMbased system that produces the transcription of a speech signal and corresponding segment boundaries given the orthographic representation of the concerning utterance (refer to Kipp et al. [2] for details). The fact that speech is highly variable has been taken into account using the rules to complement the stadstical modelling of German speech sounds and constrain the Viterbisearch.In this paper fmt a short introduction to the phenomenon of variability of speech and our approach of dealing with this problem in a technical application i s presented. This is followed by a formal description of the syntax of the rules and the inventory of symbols that is used. Finally, I give an outline of reduction phenomena in German and how they are represented in the phonetic rules.
THE REPRESENTATION OF
SEGMENTAL VARIATION IN GERMAN IN
PHONETIC RULESA fundamental property of speech is that it is highly variable. No two utterances of the same word are ever produced exactly the same. Variability concerns the production of the Same utterance of different speakers as well as the repeated production of an utterance by a single speakm (inter-vs. intra-speaker variability). Variability of speech depends among other factors on the immediate communicative situation, on the speechrate, speaking style and complexity of the semantic contents of utterances. Variability becomes apparent in the different realizations of a planned utterance. These can lie in a range from very clear, slow and precise to strongly reduced and fast This scale is known as the hyper-hypo continuum of speech (Lindblom [41).Endeavouring to be intelligible and easy to understand for a listener speakers attempt on the one hand to speak clearly and with precise articulation. This conflicts on the other hand with the general tendency to keep the articulatory effort as low as possible. In order to compromise speakers permanently adjust their perfomance by taking into account the amount of information the listener can obtain from the communicative situation and the context of an utterance (systemariented factors). Depending on the amount of information of the system-oriented factors the information that is contatned in the speech signal itself (outputoriented factors) need to be more or less explicit. Hence, the expected variation of the utterances along the continuum of hyperand hypospeech.For many speech processing tasks a representation of the pronunciation of the language concerned is required which is usually taken from common pronunciation dictionaries. The main problem w i t h this is that dictionaries mostly give only one possible form of pronunciation which is...
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