• Phoneme Mappings
  
  Most languages, including English, can be described in terms of a set of distinctive sounds, or phonemes. In particular, for American English, there are about 42 phonemes including vowels, diphthongs, semi-vowels and consonants. The internationally standard method to represent phonemes is International Phonetic Alphabet ( IPA). To enable computer representation of the phonemes, it is convenient to code them as ASCII characters. Several schemes have been proposed, e.g., ARPABET, TIMIT, CMU, WSJ and SWB. The following table shows the mapping between these representations and IPA.
  
  
  
  
• Features of Phonemes
  
  Phonemes can be classified in terms of distinct features, such as vowels, consonants, etc.
  
  
  
  
• References
  1. International Phonetic Alphabet, http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ipa.html

  2. LDC TIMIT lexicon, http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/doc/timit/phoncode.doc

  3. LDC PRONLEX Transcription, http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/readme_files/comlex_pron.readme.html.

  4. The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudic.

  5. Phoneme Classification, http://www-dsp.rice.edu/courses/elec532/PROJECTS96/synthesis/phoneme_descriptions.html, Rice University

  6. ARPABET-IPA MAPPINGS, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~laura/pages/arpabet.ps

  7. WordNet - a Lexical Database for English, http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/

  8. Calvert, Donald R. Descriptive Phonetics , Thieme Medical Publishers, 1992.