In this study we attempt to derive phonetic distances from alternative dialectal pronunciations used in different geographical varieties. We use two dialect atlases each containing the phonetic transcriptions of the same set of words at hundreds of sites. We collect the sound correspondences through alignment with the Levenshtein distance algorithm, and then apply an information-theoretic measu...

What factors influence how languages use voicing and aspiration? Some influences are phonetic: a salient auditory boundary between short and long lag VOT values favors the perception of aspiration contrasts, while a clear gestural distinction favors the production of voicing contrasts. But even within a language, speakers differ in how they produce contrasts. Examination of speaker variation in...

Most automatic speech recognition systems are currently based on tied state triphones. These tied states are usually determined by a decision tree. Decision trees can automatically cluster triphone states into many classes according to data available allowing each class to be trained efficiently. In order to achieve higher accuracy, this clustering is constrained by manually generated phonetic ...

This paper concerns the relationships amongst acoustic phonetic features of speech signals, perceived vocal effort, and speech clarity. It is presented from a statistical analysis of a good number of subjective testing on an anechoic speech corpus with 5 different vocal efforts, namely hushed, normal, raised, loud, and shouted, with an aim to map objective acoustic phonetic features onto subjec...

Motivated by the idea that differences between adult and child language learners may stem in part from initially minor differences (such as in phonetic perception) that cascade throughout other aspects of language learning, we explored to what extent training adults on a novel phonetic contrast results in improved learning of words that incorporate that contrast. Results indicate that distribut...

This paper presents the final results of an acoustic study of ethno-phonetic differentiation among native varieties of English spoken in Montreal, Canada. The preliminary results, published in Boberg (2004), gave a tentative picture of phonetic differentiation among the three largest ethnic groups in the Montreal English speech community: people of British/Irish, Italian and Ashkenazi Jewish et...

During language production planning, multiple candidate representations are implicitly activated prior to articulation. Lexical representations that are phonologically related to the target (phonological neighbors) are known to influence phonetic properties of the target word. However, the question of which dimensions of phonological similarity contribute to such lexical-phonetic effects remain...

This paper examines the usefulness of including prosodic and phonetic context information in the phoneme model of a speech recognizer. This is done by creating a series of prosodic and phonetic models and then comparing the mutual information between the observations and each possible context variable. Prosodic variables show improvement less often than phone context variables, however, prosodi...

When two different acoustic cues contribute to the perception of a phonetic distinction, a trading relation between the cues can be demonstrated if the speech stimuli are phonetically ambiguous. Do the cues trade also in unambiguous stimuli? Four different trading relations were examined using a fixed-standard AX discrimination task wi th stimuli either from the vicinity of the phonetic categor...

Phonetic context can affect speechreading confusions for phonemes. h Experiment I, behavioral experiments were performed to examine effects of context-sensitive phonetic variation on the visual confusability of consonants and vowels. h Experiment H, compubtional experiments were perfomed to assess the importance of patterns of context-sensitive visual codusability on the uniqueness of words in ...