Phonology provides a system by which a limited number of types of phonetic variation can signal communicative intentions at multiple levels of linguistic analysis. Because phonologies vary from language to language, acquiring the phonology of a language demands learning to attribute phonetic variation appropriately. Here, we studied the case of pitch-contour variation. In English, pitch contour...

An overview of a statistical paradigm for speech recognition is given where phonetic and phonological knowledge sources are seaimlessly integrated into the structure of a speech model. A unifying computational formalism is outlined in which the sub-models for the discrete, feature-based phonological and the continuous, dynamic phonetic processes in human speech production are computationally in...

Previous cross-language research has indicated that some speech contrasts present greater perceptual difficulty for adult non-native listeners than others do. It has been hypothesized that phonemic, phonetic, and acoustic factors contribute to this variability. Two experiments were conducted to evaluate systematically the role of phonemic status and phonetic familiarity in the perception of non...

In this work we present our expert system of Automatic reading or speech synthesis based on a text written in Standard Arabic, our work is carried out in two great stages: the creation of the sound data base, and the transformation of the written text into speech (Text To Speech TTS). This transformation is done firstly by a Phonetic Orthographical Transcription (POT) of any written Standard Ar...

Nonspeech stimuli influence phonetic categorization, but effects observed so far have been limited to precursors' influence on perception of following speech. However, both preceding and following speech affect phonetic categorization. This asymmetry raises questions about whether general auditory processes play a role in context-dependent speech perception. This study tested whether the asymme...

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. ...

Accurate phonetic transcription of proper nouns can be an important resource for commercial applications that embed speech echnologies, such as audio indexing and vocal phone directory lookup. However, an accurate phonetic transcription is more difficult o obtain for proper nouns than for regular words. Indeed, phonetic transcription of a proper noun depends on both the origin of the peaker pro...

We present a 1000-word continuous speech recognition (CSR) system that operates in real time on a personal computer (PC). The system, designed for large vocabulary natural language tasks, makes use of phonetic Hidden Markov models (HMM) and incorporates acoustic, phonetic, and linguistic sources of knowledge to achieve high recognition performance. We describe the various components of this sys...

This paper describes the design and implementation of the practical language learning system, and the result of the automatic pronunciation scoring for non-native English speakers. Implementing the speech recognizer, featured as two refined acoustic model sets, noise-robust data compensation, phonetic alignment, reliable rejection, etc., and by using knowledge-based acoustic-phonetic parameter ...

How do Dutch and Korean listeners use acoustic–phonetic information when learning words in an artificial language? Dutch has a voiceless ‘unaspirated’ stop, produced with shortened Voice Onset Time (VOT) in prosodic strengthening environments (e.g., in domain-initial position and under prominence), enhancing the feature { spread glottis}; Korean has a voiceless ‘aspirated’ stop produced with le...