Infants learn to segment words from fluent speech during the same period as they learn native language phonetic categories, yet accounts of phonetic category acquisition typically ignore information about the words in which speech sounds appear. We use a Bayesian model to illustrate how feedback from segmented words might constrain phonetic category learning, helping a learner disambiguate over...

Most speaker-independent acoustic-phonetic decoding systems are based on hidden Markov models. Such systems lack a real temporal control for the phonetic models. Furthermore, inter-speaker variability makes speaker adaptation necessary. In order to solve these problems, we introduce two original approaches. On the one hand, discontinuities detected with the ForwardBackward Divergence method are...

A multilingual phonetic representation and analysis system for different speech databases is presented. The need for such a system is first justified and then one is proposed based on the Worldbet phonetic alphabet. A phonetic class hierarchy is developed and a description of the hierarchical structural representation follows. Database access is based on the latter and is accomplished by defini...

There are very few input systems supporting Taiwanese and Hakka on the market at present. Our purpose is to provide an input system supporting Mandarin and Taiwanese which is toneless and complies with multiple types of phonetic symbols, we hope that such an approach can resolve the problems resulting from tone and phonetic symbols. In this paper, we use an algorithm based on three continuous l...

Abstract Substance-free phonology (SFP) is based on the hypothesis that phonological computation makes no reference to phonetic substance, and features are treated as arbitrary symbols for purposes of computation. However, phonologists within SFP tradition disagree about whether content innate or learned (“emergent”), if learned, acquisition process patterning alone refers substance. In present...

Prosodic influences on phonetic realizations of four Dutch consonants (/t d s z/) were examined. Sentences were constructed containing these consonants in word-initial position; the factors lexical stress, phrasal accent and prosodic boundary were manipulated between sentences. Eleven Dutch speakers read these sentences aloud. The patterns found in acoustic measurements of these utterances (e.g...

In spite of decades of research, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is far from reaching the goal of performance close to Human Speech Recognition (HSR). One of the reasons for unsatisfactory performance of the state-of-the-art ASR systems, that are based largely on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), is the inferior acoustic modeling of low level or phonetic level linguistic information in the speech...

Most large speech corpora are delivered with a lexicon that contains a canonical transcription of every word in the orthographic transcription. Such a lexicon can be used for generating a hypothetical ‘canonical’ phonetic transcription from the orthography. In addition, time and money permitting, some speech corpora are provided with a manually verified broad phonetic transcription of at least ...

This study is aimed at investigating whether automatic phonetic transcription procedures can approximate manual transcriptions typically delivered with contemporary large speech corpora. To this end, ten automatic procedures were used to generate a broad phonetic transcription of well-prepared speech (read-aloud texts) and spontaneous speech (telephone dialogues) from the Spoken Dutch Corpus. T...

In this paper, we present an approach for phoneme detection and phonetic classification that can be used as a basis for different speech processes, such as phoneme boundary detection, acoustic-phonetic decoding or word-graph construction with acoustic confidence scores. The phonetic classifier that has been developed is based on a phase of acoustic vector clustering in the space of acoustic cha...