The continuous nature of speech

This has practical implications in speech analysis because the coarticulation effects can be so strong that the linearity of the phoneme sequence is lost in the speech. The targets generated by the phonemes may interact so strongly that they do not encode in sequence and therefore it is impossible to point to a particular section of speech and say that is a representation of a /m/ phoneme . There is a limit to these interaction effects in broad terms one can locate a section of speech in an utterance and say what word. 

It is important not to confuse the notion of phoneme with the speeeh that is encoded by these units. Strictly speaking, when we look at a waveform or spectrogram, we are not looking at a sequence of phonemes, but rather the output of the speech production process that has encoded these phonemes. Hence strictly speaking, we can not identify phonemes in acoustic representa- 

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