4.4. Test utterance in english: male speaker MS3
The sentence studied was‘‘she can scoop this things’’(phone- tically uttered as[Piki~ıskiypjisye~ıs]), by a male American English speaker (RP). The most interesting characteristic is the way in which the speaker has uttered the vowels in ‘‘can scoop’’, as the influence of /k/ produces a shift forward in the articulation place of the following vowel,result in[kiII], and the second one is realized as[kiy] where a non-categorical [y] is used. For these reasons the non-categorical /y/ has been added to the set of categories to show how competence in Mutual Exclusion works in terms of probabilities as given in Eq. (3) (Fig. 19).
In this figure (top) there is a clear overlapping between categories /i/ and /y/ in the sequence [iy] between 0.42 and 0.54, and between /e/ and /y/ in the sequence [eII] between 0.84 and 0.94. In the bottom template it may be seen that the first assignment has been resolved in favor of /i/ followed by /y/, and the second assignment has been resolved favouring /e/ against /y/. The final vowel activity detection is shown in Fig. 20. It may be seen that although some unvoiced sibilants as [P] and[s] present clear formant bands, they are disregarded by voicing activity. Unstable patterns due to plosives have been also removed.
The most remarkable facts in this case are that the group[iII] between 0.22 and 0.28 s is coded as /ei/,[iy] between 0.44 and 0.52s is coded as /iy/ and [eII] between 0.85 and 1.04 is coded as/ei/.