Discrimination of subphonemic phonetic distinctions

Learning phonetic distinctions from speech signals

Previous work has shown that connectionist learning systems can simulate important aspects of the categorization of speech sounds by human and animal listeners. Training is on representations of synthetic, exemplar voiced and unvoiced stop consonants passed through a computational model of the auditory periphery. In this work, we use the modern inductive inference technique of support vector ma...

Learned phonetic discrimination using connectionist networks

Statistical Cues Facilitate Infants’ Discrimination of Difficult Phonetic Contrasts

Perhaps the best-known fact about developmental speech perception is that infants are remarkably adept at discriminating phonetic contrasts. In early infancy, this ability is unaffected by language environment, resulting in the surprising fact that infants can discriminate certain foreign contrasts that their parents cannot. For example, infants from English-speaking homes can hear the differen...

Voice quality: A preliminary study on the phonetic distinctions of two Cantonese accents

Hong Kong Cantonese and Guangzhou Cantonese are two fully mutually intelligible Chinese dialects that share almost the same phonological system. However, native speakers have no difficulty in distinguishing these two accents. The baffling question of what phonetic features account for the identification of these two Cantonese variants has perplexed many minds but remains unsolved. This study is...

Lateralization of phonetic and pitch discrimination in speech processing.

Cerebral activation was measured with positron emission tomography in ten human volunteers. The primary auditory cortex showed increased activity in response to noise bursts, whereas acoustically matched speech syllables activated secondary auditory cortices bilaterally. Instructions to make judgments about different attributes of the same speech signal resulted in activation of specific latera...