COMPUTER SIMULATION EXPERIMENTS IN PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY

Abstract

Speech is a continuous, highly variable acoustic signal that is perceived as a sequence of sounds and words. Phonetics and phonology are concerned with the production of these units in the human articulatory apparatus, their properties as acoustic phenomena and perception, as well as with the speech units used in a given language and their possible combinations. Experimental phonetics and laboratory phonology use corpora with large numbers of speech recordings. Alternatively, certain types of phenomena are studied specifically with humans in a laboratory setting. The paper deals with computer simulation experiments as a “third kind” approach to phonetics and phonology. Their content emphasizes the broader context of simulation technology in the process of linguistic studies of human speech. Computer simulation experiments offer the highest degree of control over data. In this article, we discuss the effectiveness of these experiments in phonetics and phonology.

Keywords: phonetics, phonology, computer technology, simulation experiments, speech technology.