The treatment of vowels preceding 'r' in a keyword lexicon of English.

Abstract

Work is progressing on a keyword lexicon aimed at enabling the synthesis of various regional accents of English. This paper focuses on a particular issue, that of vowels before orthographic 'r'. These vowels are discussed with respect to rhotic and nonrhotic accents, in terms of both keyword sets and phonetic realisation. Criteria for the use of keysymbols are discussed, and it is noted that these criteria result in inclusion of postvocalic |r| in the lexicon, with deletion by rule for non-rhotic accents. It is noted that some keyvowels in our original set have had to be split, while others may prove to be redundant.