The end-result of perceptual reorganization in infancy is currently viewed as a reconfigured perceptual space, "warped" around native-language phonetic categories, which then acts as a direct perceptual filter on any non-native sounds: naïve-listener discrimination of non-native-sounds is determined by their mapping onto native-language phonetic categories that are acoustically/articulatorily m...

This paper describes an acoustic-to-phonetic decoder (APD) (based on a mixed strategy: a) bottom-up which hypothesizes the most robust information about the speech signal, b) top-down which makes some verifications about the acoustic features or about the macro-class localization on the speech signal. In this paper, only the bottom-up strategy is described. In our system, a phoneme is described...

Generally speaking, Chinese characters are graphic characters that do not allow immediate pronunciation unless they are accompanied with Mandarin phonetic symbols (zhuyin) or other pinyin methods (e.g. romanization system). In fact, about 80 to 90 percents of Chinese characters are pictophonetic characters which are composed of a phonetic component and a semantic component. Therefore, even if o...

One of the central findings of speech perception is that identical acoustic signals can be perceived as different speech sounds depending on adjacent speech context. Although these phonetic context effects are ubiquitous in speech perception, their neural mechanisms remain largely unknown. The present work presents a review of recent data suggesting that spectral content of speech mediates phon...

This paper describes a novel approach to generate potential foreign-accented phonetic transcriptions using phonological rewrite rules. For each pair of a native language (Li) and a target language (L2), a set of postlexical rules is designed to transform canonical phonetic dictionaries of L2 into adapted dictionaries for native Li speakers. Some general considerations on the design of such a ru...

This paper describes a synthesis from analysis scheme for producing natural sounding intonation for speech synthesis. The paper presents a new method of describing F0 contours in terms of three basic phonetic intonation elements. Details are given of an automatic system for labelling F0 contours, which could be used for speech recognition purposes. Current work on extracting a phonological desc...

This paper presents a new approach to model prototypical foreign-accented pronunciation variants on the phonetic transcription level using rewrite rules. For each native language (L1) and target language (L2) pair, a set of postlexical rules is designed to transform canonical phonetic dictionaries of L2 into adapted dictionaries for native L1 speakers. Potential applications are speech recognit...

One of the central themes in the study of language acquisition is the gap between the linguistic knowledge that learners demonstrate, and the apparent inadequacy of linguistic input to support induction of this knowledge. One of the first linguistic abilities in the course of development to exemplify this problem is in speech perception: specifically, learning the sound system of one's native l...

We describe an approach to grapheme-to-phoneme conversion 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 produced for that language which takes as its input the spelling of words, and produces as its output the phonetic transcripti...

Statistic approaches in speech technology, either based on statistical language models, trees, hidden Markov models or neural networks, represent the driving forces for the creation of language resources (LR), e.g. text corpora, pronunciation lexica and speech databases. This paper presents the system architecture for rapid construction of morphologic and phonetic lexica for Slovenian language....