SOURCE-LINKED INTELLIGENCE

Letters hide the truth from our eyes: English homophones have meaningfully different phonetic realizations

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 27, 2026 · UTC

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 \textit{weight} and \textit{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 acco

Read original source ↗ Open in workspace

recordType

paper

region

Global