This article provides an overview of phonological development with a focus on production patterns occurring between birth and three years, during which the majority of development occurs. General requirements of phonological acquisition are discussed briefly, followed by a description of prelinguistic vocal development, the transition to speech, and phonological characteristics of first words. ...

logical form or covert syntax is a syntactic level introduced in recent generative approaches. using the ideas of first-order predicate logic, it interprets the strings whose elements cannot move in s–structure, because an element moves if it does not acquire its necessary scope. but unlike the predicate logic, logical form is based on syntactic principles and rules. therefore, logical form is ...

The purpose of this paper is to give an outline of phonetic level annotation and segmentation of Hungarian speech databases at the levels of definition and speech technology. In addition to giving guidance to the definition of the content of a database, the technique of annotation and the procedure of manual segmentation, we also discuss mathematical models of computeraided semi-automatic and a...

This contribution presents part of the work initiated at CTT on the development of speech technology to assist non-native speakers in learning Swedish. This study mainly focuses on the automatic evaluation of mispronunciations at a phonetic level. We describe a new database we have collected for this work. Then we report the reliability of several phonetic scores to locate automatically segment...

This paper presents a new approach to model prototypical foreign-accented pronunciation variants on the phonetic transcription level using rewrite rules. For each native language (L1) and target language (L2) pair, a set of postlexical rules is designed to transform canonical phonetic dictionaries of L2 into adapted dictionaries for native L1 speakers. Potential applications are speech recognit...

Successful information processing requires the focusing of attention on a certain stimulus property and the simultaneous suppression of irrelevant information. The Stroop task is a useful paradigm to study such attentional top-down control in the presence of interference. Here, we investigated the neural correlates of an auditory Stroop task using fMRI. Subjects focused either on tone pitch (re...

This paper focuses on an approach to improve automatic phonetic transcription of proper nouns. The method is based on a two-level iterative process that extract the phonetic variants from the audio signals before filtering the irrelevant variants. The evaluation of the method shows a decreasing of the Word Error Rate (WER) on segments of speech with proper nouns, without affecting negatively th...

The phoneme classification inaccuracy at the acoustic phonetic level is a major weakness in most speech recognition systems. However, the inaccuracy will violate phonotactic constraints at the acoustic phonetic level. A better performance is expected if a language model is adopted in a recognition system for post-processing phoneme estimates and making corrections with a set of explicit rules o...

Current HMM-based low bit rate speech coding systems work with phonetic vocoders. Pitch contour coding (on frame or phoneme level) is usually fairly orthogonal to other speech coding parameters. We make an assumption in our work that the speech signal contains supra-segmental cues. Hence, we present encoding of the pitch on the syllable level, used in the framework of a recognition/synthesis sp...