Relative Occurrence of Phonemes in American English

Abstract

is determined by the time of day you choose for your experiments. I often demonstrate the binaural vs monaural effects by having a person in a crowded restaurant close off one ear with the finger. He then loses the ability to concentrate on one chosen talker when three or four persons are talking simultaneously.When the organized sounds are music rather than speech, true binaural listening gives the listener the ability to concentrate on (i.e., selectively amplify) one choir of instruments at the expense of all the others. The comparison with cross-correlation performance in 2-channel receiving systems is striking.All in all, the compromise system has enough good points in it to merit serious consideration. It is not an antisocial device because you can carry on a conversation with your guests at least as well as with two loudspeakers going. You need not be "wired for sound" if you use any of the well-known wireless methods such as an induction loop, a radio transmitter, or the ultrasonic transducer mentioned in the foregoing. The subjective results are almost as good as true binaural listening, and orders of magnitude better than a 2-channel stereophonic system (which is capable of lateral and depth localization and absolutely nothing more).N the past few decades, several attempts have been made to record the relative frequency of occurrence of the phonemic elements of American speech. Almost every attempt has left some question of validity. One • was derived primarily from written material; another •' from radio announcements; a third a from the speech of 30-month-old children.The study of telephone conversations by French, Carter, and Koenig, 4 however, seems to have avoided many of the pitfalls of validity. The language was that of adult Americans, speaking extemporaneously, and was recorded verbatim with a few logical limitations (stereotyped telephone greetings, nonfluencies, and profanity were omitted, for instance). Yet, a number of times when investigators have considered using the French, Carter, and Koenig data, some uncertainty has arisen because of certain details of the method they used. The original recordings were stenographic; the phonetic transcription was done by the authors --engineers--who attempted to transcribe words according to what "we regarded as being typical pronounciation heard in reasonably enunciated conversation among educated persons in New York." In addition, two of the authors were from the eastern part of the country. Considering these problems of transcription, one might well assume that the table of relative frequency of occurrence of phonemic elements published in that 1930 paper had certain phonemes weighted out of proportion as a result of the peculiarities of the regional speech represented.Several years ago, it became necessary for the author to retranscribe the word lists used by French, Carter, and Koenig according to the General American pronunciations suggested by Kenyon and Knott. 5 A copy of the original published list, corrected by N. R. French, was used. In thos...

A Statistical Basis for Speech Sound Discrimination

“…As every contestant on Wheel of Fortune knows, the most frequent English consonantal phonemes are /t/ , /d/ , / s /, and /n / -all coronals (French, Carter, & Koenig, 1930;Tobias, 1959). Previous studies investigating infants' ability to discriminate non-native contrasts have focused on either coronal or dorsal stop consonants.…”

Effects of Stimulus Bandwidth on the Imitation of English Fricatives by Normal-Hearing Children

“…Even when the identity of a phoneme was diminished by bandwidth restriction, the noise was still audible. Since /s/ is the fourth most frequent consonant and the most frequent fricative in English (Tobias, 1959), when the phoneme was masked by the noise, children might have interpreted this noise as /s/ based on prior phonological knowledge; this strategy might have increased the total number of /s/ responses, which in turn, increased the number of correct /s/ responses.…”

“…They are the 4th and 12th most frequently occurring phonemes, respectively (Tobias, 1959) and serve multiple linguistic functions, including rules for marking plurality, possession, and verb tense (Denes, 1963; Rudmin, 1983). They are also among the most frequently misperceived phonemes for adults with hearing loss (Dubno & Dirks, 1982; Owens, 1978; Owens, Benedict, & Schubert, 1972).…”

A Voice Incidence Study: Portland, Oregon

“…Of the three resonating cavities (pharyngeal, oral, and nasal), the oral cavity is the major resonating cavity in normal speech. Because full nasal resonance is normally produced only on the three nasal consonants which constitute approximately 11 percent of the phonemes occurring in speech (Tobias, 1959), the nasal cavity is the least used vocal resonance cavity (Fisher, 1966). Some nasal resonance, however, is present in all speech (Wilson, 1972) and a certain amount of nasality is usually considered to be pleasant (Greene, 1964;and Zemlin, 1968).…”