Glottal stop detection in German-accented English using ASR

Glottal stops are sounds produced by the closing and abrupt opening of the vocal folds. In German, glottal stops are frequent before word-initial vowels and are a salient word-linking technique. For this reason, German speakers can transfer this word-linking habit to their English productions. Neither in English nor in German are glottal stops phonemes, i.e. they cannot differentiate word meaning. However, glottal stops should be acoustic modeled since a) they are good indicators of word and morpheme boundaries and can improve ASR performance [1, 2], b) automatic pre-segmentation of glottal stops is quite useful in basic phonetic research.