Neural representations of words are thought to have a complex spatio-temporal cortical basis. It has been suggested that spoken word recognition is not a process of feed-forward computations from phonetic to lexical forms, but rather involves the online integration of bottom-up input with stored lexical knowledge. Using direct neural recordings from the temporal lobe, we examined cortical respo...

In this paper, we construct multi-path syllable models using phonetic knowledge for initialising the parallel paths, and a data-driven solution for their re-estimation. We hypothesise that the richer topology of multi-path syllable models would be better at accounting for pronunciation variation than context-dependent phone models that can only account for the effects of left and right neighbou...

We propose a simple, yet novel, multi-layer model for the problem of phonetic classification. Our model combines the frame level transformation of the acoustic signal with the segment level transformation via a temporal pooling architecture to compute class conditional probabilities of phones. Without the use of any phonetic knowledge, our model achieved the state-ofthe-art performance on the T...

We introduce a new approach to spellchecking for languages with extreme phonetic irregularities. The spelling for such languages can be significantly improved if knowledge about pronunciation and sound becomes the central part of the spelling algorithm. However, given a weak phoneme-grapheme-correspondence the standard spelling algorithms, which are rule-based or editdistance-based, are severel...

We describe an approach to grapheme to phoneme conver sion which is both language independent and data oriented Given a set of examples spelling words with their associated phonetic representation in a language a grapheme to phoneme conversion system is automatically pro duced for that language which takes as its input the spelling of words and produces as its output the phonetic transcription ...

In this paper we discuss a speaker identification approach, called ASR-dependent speaker identification, that incorporates phonetic knowledge into the models for each speaker. This approach differs from traditional methods for performing textindependent speaker identification, such as global Gaussian mixture modeling, that typically ignore the phonetic content of the speech signal. We introduce...

In this paper we revisit the task of spell checking focusing on target word recovery. We propose a new approach that relies on phonetic information to improve the accuracy of clustering algorithms in identifying misspellings and generating accurate suggestions. The use of phonetic information is not new to the task of spell checking and it was used successfully in previous approaches. The combi...

Although infants show remarkable sensitivity to linguistically relevant phonetic variation in speech, young children sometimes appear not to make use of this sensitivity. Here, children's knowledge of the sound-forms of familiar words was assessed using a visual fixation task. Dutch 19-month-olds were shown pairs of pictures and heard correct pronunciations and mispronunciations of familiar wor...

Does alphabetic-phonetic writing start with the proper name and how does the name affect reading and writing skills? Sixty 4- to 5(1/2)-year-old children from middle SES families with Dutch as their first language wrote their proper name and named letters. For each child we created unique sets of words with and without the child's first letter of the name to test spelling skills and phonemic se...

Knowledge of typical phonological development in bilingual children is limited. Bilingual children are often compared to their monolingual peers to determine typical from disordered development; however, it is not known if this comparison is an appropriate one. Although there have been some studies examining accuracy of production in bilinguals (GildersleeveNeumann, Kester, Davis, & Peña, 2008;...