Speech is a continuous signal flow, not discrete concatenated units
Evidence
Since there is temporal continuity of articulatory motion of the speech production mechanism, each unit is influenced by the preceding and following units. Therefore, speech is never composed of units in isolation but of a continuous flow of signal states. On the other hand, the structure of spoken language cannot be understood without some kind of discrete units that are concatenated into speech signals conveying linguistic information. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 565
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: This is the classic continuous-vs-discrete tension underlying ASR architecture and phonetic coarticulation research — parallels the analog/digital dichotomy in signal processing.
Related
- Speech is a continuous flow that still requires discrete units to be understood (similarity 0.92)
- Articulatory synthesis models speech dynamics but is too complex for practical synthesizers (similarity 0.83)
- A full speech communication chain spans brain, vocal organs, channel, and hearing. (similarity 0.80)
- Phonetic information concentrates either in a phone’s steady core or its transition boundary (similarity 0.79)
- The brain processes continuous speech differently than discrete isolated sounds. (similarity 0.79)
- Language knowledge beyond acoustics is required for automatic speech recognition. (similarity 0.79)
- Words emerge from whole speech, not from combination of words (similarity 0.78)