In this work, we present an innovative approach for grapheme to phoneme conversion, which achieves very low error rates for languages like British English, American English and Dutch, and gives good generalization performances. One of the basic steps in the text-to-speech conversion performed by the speech synthesis systems is the phonetic transcription of the input text that can be considered ...

A long-standing issue in the theory and description of bilingualism is whether bilingual children develop one or two linguistic systems in the learning of their two languages. The one-system hypothesis (Swain, 1972; Volterra & Taeschner, 1978) suggests that children initially posit linguistic rules common to both languages; then they differentiate the two as they master higher linguistic knowle...

The reported study was aimed at developing effective techniques for reducing learner cognitive overload while using pinyin (a phonetic system) to learn Chinese language. Learning effects of two instructional conditions (character-pinyin-pronunciation and character-pronunciation) were compared for learners with different levels of prior Mandarin proficiency and pinyin knowledge. It was expected ...

kurdish language is one of the iranian languages and the historical study of the phonetic system of khorasan kormanji dialect, can clearly show that this language has been under the influence of iranian languages, especially persian language. the author of the article has used prof. tsablof’s (the most famous russian orientalist) publications, to show the persian language influence on khorasan ...

Phonological rules relate surface phonetic word forms to abstract underlying forms that are stored in the lexicon. Infants must thus acquire these rules in order to infer the abstract representation of words. We implement a statistical learning algorithm for the acquisition of one type of rule, namely allophony, which introduces context-sensitive phonetic variants of phonemes. This algorithm is...

Recent work in phonetic speaker recognition has shown that modeling phone sequences using n-grams is a viable and effective approach to speaker recognition, primarily aiming at capturing speaker-dependent pronunciation and also word usage. This paper describes a method involving binary-tree-structured statistical models for extending the phonetic context beyond that of standard n-grams (particu...

This paper first summarizes some phonetic observations that challenge theories of speech perception and speech understanding which assume the speech signal is converted to an abstract form, such as features or phonemes, before it can be understood, and that ‘knowledge-driven’ processes are largely ‘top down’ rather than signal-driven. Systematic variation in fine phonetic detail is shown to ind...

Previous studies have shown improved sensitivity to native-language contrasts and reduced sensitivity to non-native phonetic contrasts when comparing 6-8 and 10-12-month-old infants. This developmental pattern is interpreted as reflecting the onset of language-specific processing around the first birthday. However, generalization of this finding is limited by the fact that studies have yielded ...