Frequency of occurrence of phonemes and allophones in contemporary Spanish as calculated by an automatic transcription system

Abstract

The frequency of occurrence of the different phonemes of the Spanish language has been the subject of several previous studies. However, most of those studies did not take into account the frequency of the allophones, or they did it only partially (many times there was not even a phonetic transcription, and the plain orthographic transcription was used instead). Moreover, in all those previous works the frequency of occurrence was calculated from the transcription of isolated words, without taking into account the phonetic changes produced by its insertion in the speech chain, especially that of resyllabification. The present article calculates the frequency of occurrence of the phonemes and allophones of the Castilian Spanish dialect, as they are pronounced in the spoken language. The transcription of a corpus (consisting in 560 novels of modern Spanish writers) is done automatically thanks to a piece of software implemented for the purpose of this study. The article details the contents of the corpus as well as a detailed description of the design of the automatic transcriber. Finally, there is also a limited study of the syllable structure in terms of its type and frequency of occurrence.