Letters hide the truth from our eyes: English homophones have meaningfully different phonetic realizations
cs.CL
Submitted: 2026-08-27
Updated: 2026-08-27
Comments: 54 pages, 9 figures
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: The distribution of spoken word duration of English homophones is known to co-vary with frequency of use.
Terminology
Abstract
The distribution of spoken word duration of English homophones is known to co-vary with frequency of use. This study investigates whether other aspects of the phonetic realization of homophones also differ. A series of quantitative investigations of 14,000 homophone tokens in American television news broadcasts revealed that the tokens of homophone pairs such as weight and wait have different phonetic realizations, and that these can be predicted from their meanings in utterance context. These systematic differences remain even when taking duration-related variation into account. Time-normalized spectrograms emerged as an excellent tool for probing the fine details of phonetic realization, and obviate the need for phonetic transcriptions, which inevitably hide the phonetic truth from our eyes.
Sources
- Word-specific tonal realizations in Mandarin
- A new kid on the block: Distributional semantics predicts the word-specific tone signatures of monosyllabic words in conversational Taiwan Mandarin
- The realization of tones in spontaneous spoken Taiwan Mandarin: a corpus-based survey and theory-driven computational modeling
Related papers
- Exploring Solution Divergence and Its Effect on Large Language Model Problem Solving
- Ishigaki-IDS-Bench: A Benchmark for Generating Information Delivery Specification from BIM Information Requirements
- Subliminal Steering: Stronger Encoding of Hidden Signals
- MedStruct-S: A Benchmark for Key Discovery, Key-Conditioned QA and Semi-Structured Extraction from OCR Clinical Reports
- The End of Transformers? On Challenging Attention and the Rise of Sub-Quadratic Architectures
- Untangling the Mechanisms of Misleading Context in Medical Question Answering