The human ability to understand speech is underpinned by a hierarchical auditory system whose successive stages process increasingly complex attributes of the acoustic input. It has been suggested that to produce categorical speech perception, this system must elicit consistent neural responses to speech tokens (e.g., phonemes) despite variations in their acoustics. Here, using electroencephalo...

Dyslexia is commonly attributed to a phonological deficit, but whether it effectively compromises the phonological grammar or lower level systems is rarely explored. To address this question, we gauge the sensitivity of dyslexics to grammatical phonological restrictions on spoken onset clusters (e.g., bl in block). Across languages, certain onsets are preferred to others (e.g., blif ≻ bnif ≻ bd...

This paper describes our recent efforts in exploring datadriven high-level features and their combination with low-level spectral features for speaker verification. In particular, we compare the phonetic and data-driven approaches and study their complementarity with short-term acoustic approach. Our objective is to show that data-driven units automatically acquired from the speech data, can be...

This study proposes a framework of automatic analysis and recognition of pitch accent patterns. In the first place we present the results of analyses which aimed at identification of acoustic cues signaling prominent syllables and different pitch accent types distinguished at the surface-phonological level. The resulting representation provides a framework of analysis of pitch accent patterns a...