Synthesis By Rule as a Tool for Phonological Research
The phonologist, having analysed a corpus of phonetic data and proposed tentative phonological rules, must test these rules by generating novel utterances for acceptance or rejection by an informant. There are certain methodological problems in such testing which could be avoided by the use of speech synthesized by rule. Synthesis by rule is now a practical technique, and a synthesis-by-rule system at Haskins Laboratories has been used to formulate rules for General American English.
Building on old foundations : From phonemic theory to C/V-segregation
This paper aims at showing that the scope of structural phonemics transcends the limits of the 'foundations of phonology', contrary to what is tacitly assumed and appears from some textbooks. It will be argued that the classical concept phoneme, defined as a set of distinctive features, presents both obsolete and still relevant properties. One of these properties, linearity, should clearly be abandoned, as follows from acoustic-perceptual evidence as well as from some types of sound change. Thereby, the phoneme in its purest sense can be said to have been superseded by one major trend characterizing post-SPE phonological theory: multilinearity. However, a phoneme-based property of distinctive features, their locality, is still valid, and is empirically supported by cross-linguistic variation. Now, locality and non-linearity are apparently contradictory. It will be shown that this contradiction cannot be resolved, and that both feature properties cannot be captured, unless consonants and vowels are assumed to be universally segregated within phonological representations. This issue leads to several predictions on C/C and V/V interactions, converges with independent processual evidence like vowel-to-vowel assimilation, and addresses the question of the relationship between phonology and morphology.
Real‐Time Formant Vocoder, Using a Filter Bank, a General‐Purpose Digital Computer, and an Analog Synthesizer
A formant vocoder has been built as a combination of analog equipment and a digital computer. The time domain operations—spectrum filtering and synthesis—are done in analog form. The formant‐extraction operations are done at modest sampling rates (about 100 scans/sec) with a DDP‐24 computer. The program is a tightly coded form of an analysis method described earlier [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 35, 1911 (1963)] and first written in FORTRAN to run slower than real time with a programmed synthesizer. Spectra from a 24‐channel filter bank are scanned for a peak, a resonance curve of appropriate frequency and average bandwidth is subtracted, and the process repeated to obtain four maxima. The lower three of these, ordered in frequency, are transmitted to the synthesizer along with other control data. The analyzer, in minimal form, takes about 7 msec to run and 1 msec for input‐output, leaving time for a few frills in a 10‐ to 12‐msec scanning period. Tapes of the system are demonstrated.