Discrimination of three synthetic versions of a/ra-la/ speech continuum was studied in two species of birds. The stimuli used in these experiments were identical to those used in a previous study of speech perception by humans [Best et al., Percept. Psychophys. 45, 237-250 (1989)]. Budgerigars and zebra finches were trained using operant conditioning and tested on three different series of acou...

This paper describes speaker discrimination experiments in which native English listeners were presented with natural speech stimuli in English and Mandarin, synthetic speech stimuli in English and Mandarin, or natural Mandarin speech and synthetic English speech stimuli. In each experiment, listeners were asked to judge whether the sentences in a pair were spoken by the same person or not. We ...

Users of cochlear implants (CIs) vary widely in their ability to recognize speech in noisy conditions. There are many factors that may influence their performance. We have investigated to what degree it can be explained by the users’ ability to discriminate spectral shapes. A speech recognition task has been simulated using both a simple and a complex models of CI hearing. The models were indiv...

The paper addresses the problem of discrimination of homographs when a lengthy segment of an uttered word is missing. The considered discrimination procedure is done by recognizer that operates on cepstrum coefficients extracted from the speech signal. For restoration of the missing speech segment rather than use of the known speech signal, it has been proposed to calculate speech signal charac...