Re: Allophone Problem

Hi!

David J. Peterson writes:
> Henrik wrote:
> <<
> Actually, I doubt there is, in the vast majority of German dialects,
> any difference of final -/d/ and final -/t/.  My dialect for one, I am
> sure, has a perfect merger.  If I don't know a spelling, it is
> impossible for me to judge how to write that word without checking
> related forms with a following vowel.
>  >>
>
> 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.

**Henrik

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