A model of the effect of the longitudinal optical phonon number distribution on the Rabi oscillations of the photons involved in the associated indirect transition in a semiconductor is presented. It is shown that a faster cavity photon revival rate is obtained given an initial squeezed thermal phonon state. This is the result of pairwise correlations of phonons due to squeezing and also holds true when phonons are in squeezed vacuum or in squeezed number states. It may be possible to use this effect to detect squeezing in phonons. ©1997 American Institute of Physics.