The role of positional probability in the segmentation of Cantonese speech

The present paper examines the question of whether native Cantonese listeners make use of probabilistic phonotactics information of words in the segmentation process of Cantonese continuous speech. Because some sounds appear more frequently at the beginning or ending of Cantonese syllables than the others, these kinds of probabilistic information of syllables may be likely to cue the locations of possible syllable boundaries in Cantonese continuous speech. A syllable-spotting experiment was conducted and the results indicated that native Cantonese listeners indeed made use of the positional probabilities of a syllable's onset but not for the case of a syllable's final in the segmentation process. Along with my previous study [1]. I argue that probabilistic phonotactics is one useful source of information in Cantonese speech segmentation. Copyright © 2006 the International Speech Communication Association.