Phonetic Analysis of Pronounceability

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Phonetic transcriptions of 239 trigram pronunciations were obtained and analyzed in order to determine the amount and type of speech information they contained, and possibly, to gain some insight into the parameters of pronounceability. When pronounced, trigrams yielded from 2 to 6 phonemes in 8 different syllable structures and were either monosyllabic or disyllabic. Neither the statistical frequency of phoneme contexts in spoken English or the motoric ease of phoneme articulation were observed to explain adequately the ease or difficulty of pronouncing trigrams. A more likely explanation, the presence or absence of grapheme-phoneme correspondence, did not appear to account for all variations in rated pronounceability.