7.3.1 Phonetic Features

The phoneme gives us only a very gross way to model contextual effects. Many of the phonetic processes like assimilation and deletion are best modeled by more fine-grained articulatory facts about the neighboring context. Fig. 7.10 showed that /t/ and /d/ were deleted before [h], [dh], and [w]; rather than list all the possible following

phones which could influence deletion, we'd like to generalize that /t/ often deletes "before consonants". Similarly, flapping can be viewed as a kind of voicing assimilation, in which unvoiced /t/ becomes a voiced tap [dx] in between voiced vowels or glides. Rather than list every possible vowel or glide, we'd like to say that flapping happens 'near vowels or voiced segments'. Finally, vowels that precede nasal sounds [n], [m], and [ng], often acquire some of the nasal quality of the following vowel. In each of these cases, a phone is influenced by the articulation of the neighboring phones (nasal, consonantal, voiced). The reason these changes happen is that the movement of the speech articulators (tongue, lips, velum) during speech production is continuous and is subject to physical constraints like momentum. Thus an articulator may start moving during one phone to get into place in time for the next phone. When the realization of a phone is influenced by the articulatory movement of neighboring phones, we say it is influenced by coarticulation. Coarticulation is the movement of articulators to anticipate the next sound, or perseverating movement from the last sound.

We can capture generalizations about the different phones that cause coarticulation by using distinctive features. Features are (generally) binary variables which express some generalizations about groups of phonemes. For example the feature [voice] is true of the voiced sounds (vowels, [n], [v], [b], etc); we say they are [+voice] while unvoiced sounds are [-voice]. These articulatory features can draw on the articulatory ideas of place and manner that we described earlier. Common place features include [+labial] ([p, b, m]), [+coronal] ([ch d dh jh l n r s sh t th z zh]), and [+dorsal]. Manner features include [+consonantal] (or alternatively [+vocalic]), [+continuant], [+sonorant]. For vowels, features include [+high], [+low], [+back], [+round] and so on. Distinctive features are used to represent each phoneme as a matrix of feature values. Many different sets of distinctive features exist; probably any of these are perfectly adequate for most computational purposes. Fig. 7.11 shows the values for some phones from one partial set of features.

One main use of these distinctive features is in capturing natural articulatory classes of phones. In both synthesis and recognition, as we will see, we often need to build models of how a phone behaves in a certain context. But we rarely have enough data to model the interaction of every possible left and right context phone on the behavior of a phone. For this reason we can use the relevant feature ([voice], [nasal], etc) as a useful model of the context; the feature functions as a kind of backoff model of the phone. Another use in speech recognition is to build articulatory feature detectors and use them to help in the task of phone detection; for example Kirchhoff et al. (2002) built neural-net detectors for the following set of multi-valued articulatory features and used them to improve the detection of phones in German speech recognition: