Re: Allophone Problem

Henrik Theiling wrote:
...
>> Well, that's exactly the thing, though.  They ran experiments
>> with people just like you who never doubted that the words
>> were identical, and they consistently were able to spot which
>> one ended in a voiced consonant and which one a voiceless
>> (they tested the results statistically, and all that).
>
> Interesting.  It is a bit puzzling, though.  How can the speech center
> produce different phones when for the rest of the brain, they are
> identical?  I could imagine the reverse case, when the human is sure
> there is a difference when there really is none in the audio data, but
> the other way around contradicts my intuition.
>
> I think I will have a read some papers then.
I gather that in some dialects of Swedish, there are two kinds of /e/
which never merged, but merged in the standard varieties, so the
orthography doesn’t distinguish them. Phonetically I think they’re
fairly distinct (not like these near merges that miss), and the
distinction is quite consistent, but native speakers consider them to be
the same.

Perhaps one of our Swedish listmembers can provide more detail on that,
at least..?

--
Tristan.

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