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What is a phoneme? 


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A phoneme is the smallest distinctive sound unit in a language. It plays a crucial role in speech recognition, distinguishing one word from another. Traditional theories consider phonemes as units of speech perception and access codes to lexical representations, characterized by their segment-sized nature and abstract properties. While phonemes are essential for speech recognition systems, they are also utilized in speaker identification processes, where phoneme extraction from voice recordings aids in identifying speakers based on associated frequencies and amplitudes. However, there are debates challenging the phoneme hypothesis, with some arguing for different-sized phonological units or detailed acoustic representations instead of abstract codes. Despite these debates, phonemes remain fundamental in understanding language structure and processing, serving as key elements in various linguistic and technological applications.

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Open accessJournal ArticleDOI
33 Citations
A phoneme is a segment-sized and abstract unit crucial for speech perception and lexical access, despite challenges to its validity, supported by linguistic data and top-down processing in speech perception.
A phoneme is a fundamental unit of sound in speech, crucial for speaker identification. This study explores phonemes' frequencies and amplitudes to aid in identifying speakers based on their voice.
Book ChapterDOI
07 Jul 2022
A phoneme is a fundamental unit in phonology, representing distinct sounds in a language. However, the paper challenges its adequacy in explaining complex phonological processes beyond surface occurrences.
A phoneme is the smallest sound unit in a language. This paper focuses on phoneme recognition using attention-based methods in speech applications like auto speech recognition and lip sync.
A phoneme is a distinct sound unit in a language that helps differentiate between words, while a phone is any speech sound, regardless of its importance to word meaning.

Related Questions

What is a phoneme?4 answersA phoneme is the smallest sound unit in a language that distinguishes one word from another. Phonemes play a crucial role in various linguistic applications such as speech recognition, speaker identification, and language processing. While phonemes are traditionally viewed as distinct sound units, recent research suggests a more complex relationship between phonemes and mental representations. Some argue that phonemes are reflections of pre-existing mental images rather than purely distinct sounds. Despite differing perspectives on the nature of phonemes, their significance in language processing remains undisputed, with advancements in deep learning models like Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) and attention-based seq2seq networks enhancing phoneme recognition accuracy. Phonemes are essential for understanding the structure and meaning of words in different languages.
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What are the distinctive features of phonetics and phonology?5 answersPhonetics and phonology are two branches of linguistics that study the properties and functions of sounds. Phonetics focuses on the physical aspects of speech sounds, such as their production, transmission, and perception. It deals with segmental information, which includes vowels and consonants, as well as suprasegmental features like tone, intonation, and stress. Phonology, on the other hand, examines the abstract and mental representations of sounds in language. It investigates how sounds function in a particular language system and how they interact with each other to convey meaning. Phonology is concerned with the organization of sounds into syllables, words, and beyond. While phonetics and phonology are closely related, they differ in their research objects and the questions they ask.
What is the sound in language?3 answersThe sound in language refers to the characteristics of speech sounds, including quality or timbre, length, loudness, and pitch height. These auditory impressions can be related to the acoustic dimensions of time, intensity, and frequency. The study of phonetics explores how these sounds are produced, transferred from the speaker to the hearer, and perceived. It also examines the role of markedness in linguistic theory, the necessity of abstraction, features and formal notation, issues in speech perception, and variations in sociolinguistics. The understanding of speech sounds is grounded in facts and assumptions from the biology of sound production, reception, and understanding systems. The field of language-music, which encompasses both language and music as culturally constructed expressive forms, also contributes to the study of sound in language.
What is phoneme?5 answersA phoneme is the smallest sound unit of a language. It is a cognitive and mental unit that plays a crucial role in linguistic competence. Phonemes are used in various speech-based applications such as auto speech recognition and lip sync. They can be recognized using deep learning models like Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) and attention-based seq2seq networks. Visemes, on the other hand, are the visual equivalent of phonemes. They represent sets of phonemes that have identical appearance on the lips. Visemes introduce ambiguity between phonemes, which can affect the performance of audio-visual classifiers. Different viseme-to-phoneme mappings can have varying performance, and new algorithms like Bear visemes have been developed to improve accuracy. Phonemes are also used in multilingual story segmentation, where phoneme lattices are used to represent speech and improve segmentation performance.