Are there acoustic invariants that mediate the perception of phonemes? If there were, they might be shared by a number of languages. But this acoustic-phonemic relationship does not occur in a simple way for any of the languages that have been examined. Has, then, such an approach to speech perception been abandoned? Not entirely; some theorists argue that there are invariant acoustic propertie...

In this paper, we present a real-time facial animation system in which speech drives mouth movements and facial expressions synchronously. Considering five basic emotions, a hierarchical structure with an upper-layer of emotion classification is established. Based on the recognized emotion label, the under-layer classification at sub-phonemic level has been modelled on the relationship between ...

Phonemic accuracy of children with cochlear implants (CI) is often reported to be lower in comparison with normally hearing (NH) age-matched children. In this study, we compare phonemic accuracy development in the spontaneous speech of Dutch-speaking children with CI and NH age-matched peers. A dynamic cost model of Levenshtein distance is used to compute the accuracy of each word token. We set...

Given the role of phonemic awareness in learning to read and spell, it is important to examine the linguistic factors that influence children's performance on phonemic awareness tasks. We found that, contrary to some previous claims, children did not perform better with fricative consonants (e.g., /z/) than with stops (e.g., /d/) in a phoneme recognition task. However, preschoolers and kinderga...

We asked to what extent phonetic convergence across speakers may facilitate later word recognition. Northern-French participants showed both a clear phonetic convergence effect toward Southern French in a word repetition task, and a bias toward the phonemic system of their own variety in the recognition of single words. Perceptual adaptation to a non-native accent may be difficult when the nati...

A meta-analysis of 30 studies with 1,269 participants was conducted to investigate the sensitivity of tests of verbal fluency to the presence of traumatic brain injury (TBI). As has been found for patients with focal frontal lobe injuries (but not for patients with focal temporal lobe lesions), TBI patients were comparably impaired on tests of phonemic and semantic fluency. The phonemic fluency...

Transcription of speech is an important part of language documentation, and yet speech recognition technology has not been widely harnessed to aid linguists. We explore the use of a neural network architecture with the connectionist temporal classification loss function for phonemic and tonal transcription in a language documentation setting. In this framework, we explore jointly modelling phon...

Inner speech, that little voice that people often hear inside their heads while thinking, is a form of mental imagery. The properties of inner speech errors can be used to investigate the nature of inner speech, just as overt slips are informative about overt speech production. Overt slips tend to create words (lexical bias) and involve similar exchanging phonemes (phonemic similarity effect). ...

We address the problem of estimating the word error rate (WER) of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system without using acoustic test data. This is an important problem which is faced by the designers of new applications which use ASR. Quick estimate of WER early in the design cycle can be used to guide the decisions involving dialog strategy and grammar design. Our approach involves estim...

Studies have demonstrated that in verbal fluency tests, monolinguals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) show greater difficulties retrieving words based on semantic rather than phonemic rules. The present study aimed to determine whether this difficulty was reproduced in both languages of Spanish/English bilinguals with mild to moderate AD whose primary language was Spanish. Performance on semantic ...