Phonetic information concentrates either in a phone’s steady core or its transition boundary

Evidence

The duality of phones and diphones reflects the fact that some phones are quite static, carrying information in their central part, while in other cases the transition (diphone nucleus) carries the main phonetic information. • Triphone: a temporal unit that covers two diphones. Longer units include more coarticulation within them, which is favourable in speech technology applications (recognition and synthesis), but on the other hand the combinatory explosion of the number of possible units makes them more problematic than short units. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 571

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s acoustic communication focus — this segmentation trade-off directly bears on how ASR and TTS systems represent speech.