Phonotactical Constraints strength changes as function of inside syllable position

The aim of the work is to show how much and where the spoken chain is constrained by paradigmatic neighbouring effects. The constraints strength is evaluated in information theory terms by the ratio between the average mutual information of phonetic symbol pairs and the entropy of the phonetic sequence. Positional variation of the symbols predictability is evidenced by evaluating the strength measure along a probabilistic phonetic word model, which takes into account the phonological knowledge about the syllable structure. The parameters of the model are estimated from a phonetic sequence training corpus obtained by automatic translation and syllabic segmentation of a training text data base.