In this paper we investigate named entity transliteration based on a phonetic scoring method. The phonetic method is computed using phonetic features and carefully designed pseudo features. The proposed method is tested with four languages – Arabic, Chinese, Hindi and Korean – and one source language – English, using comparable corpora. The proposed method is developed from the phonetic method ...

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...

The phonetic inventories of 13 Italian children at 18, 21, 24 and 27 months of age are presented. The children were taperecorded during a play interaction with the mother, and their vocalizations were phonetically transcribed. The individual phonetic inventories were calculated by applying the criteria put forward by Stoel-Gammon [1]: a consonantal singleton or cluster was attested only if word...

We present a phonetic algorithm that fuses existing techniques and introduces new features. This combination offers improved precision and recall.

Prosodic structure encodes grouping of words into hierarchically layered prosodic constituents, including the prosodic word, intermediate phrase (ip) and intonational phrase (IP). This paper investigates the phonetic encoding of prosodic structure from a corpus of scripted broadcast news speech through analysis of the acoustic correlates of prosodic boundary at three levels of prosodic structur...

Listeners adjust their phonetic categories to cope with variations in the speech signal (phonetic recalibration). Previous studies have shown that lipread speech (and word knowledge) can adjust the perception of ambiguous speech and can induce phonetic adjustments (Bertelson, Vroomen, & de Gelder in Psychological Science, 14(6), 592-597, 2003; Norris, McQueen, & Cutler in Cognitive Psychology, ...

All languages employ certain phonetic contrasts when distinguishing words. Infant speech perception is rapidly attuned to these contrasts before many words are learned, thus phonetic attunement is thought to proceed independently of lexical and referential knowledge. Here, evidence to the contrary is provided. Ninety-eight 9-month-old English-learning infants were trained to perceive a non-nati...

Sound to Sense (S2S) is a Marie Curie Research Training Network, funded 2007-2011. It involves some 50 researchers in 13 institutions in 10 countries. The ultimate aim of S2S is to provide models of speech processing that closely reflect the exquisite flexibility and robustness of human speech processing (HSP), that pave the way for the next generation of robust automatic speech recognition (AS...

Neural changes related to the learning of the pronunciation of Chinese characters in English speakers were examined using fMRI. We examined the item-specific learning effects for trained characters and the generalization of phonetic knowledge to novel transfer characters that shared a phonetic radical (part of a character that gives a clue to the whole character's pronunciation) with trained ch...