Same-different discrimination judgments for pairs of Korean stop consonants, or of Japanese syllables differing in phonetic segment length, were made by adult Korean adoptees in the Netherlands, by matched Dutch controls, and Korean controls. The adoptees did not outdo either control group on either task, although the same individuals had performed significantly better than matched controls on ...

computer-assisted language learning (call) is reaching an up most position in the pedagogical field of english as a second or foreign language (esl/efl). the present study was carried out to study the effect of using phonetic websites on iranian efl students’ pronunciation and knowledge of phonemic symbols. participants of the study included 30 efl female pre-intermediate students studying in k...

Lexical knowledge influences how human listeners make decisions about speech sounds. Positive lexical effects (faster responses to target sounds in words than in nonwords) are robust across several laboratory tasks, while negative effects (slower responses to targets in more word-like nonwords than in less word-like nonwords) have been found in phonetic decision tasks but not phoneme monitoring...

Although first demonstrators for speech to speech translation have been presented, they are still ‘show cases’ with lacking robustness for everyday usage. This lacking robustness is caused by the insufficient performance of the building blocks of speech to speech translation systems i.e. of speech recognition, spoken language translation and speech synthesis. In the context of a phonetic confer...

We propose a method that combines acoustic-phonetic knowledge with support vector machines for segmentation of continuous speech into five classes vowel, sonorant consonant, fricative, stop and silence. We show that by using a probabilistic phonetic feature hierarchy, only four classifiers are required to recognize the five classes. Due to the probabilistic nature of the hierarchy, the method o...

This study investigates phonetic and lexical effects on speech perception of high-falling tones and low-falling tones in Hakka and Mandarin. An identification task and a lexical decision task were conducted on 30 participants for each language. The results illustrate that onset pitch and pitch drop are more crucial phonetic attributes than offset pitch for native speakers to distinguish high-fa...

To investigate the interaction in speech perception between lexical knowledge (in particular, whether a stimulus token makes a word or nonword) and phonetic categorization, sets of [bVC]-[dVC] place-of-articulation continua were constructed so that the endpoint tokens represented word-word, word-nonword, nonword-word, and nonword-nonword combinations. Experiment 1 demonstrated that ambiguous to...

In this paper, we apply context dependent phonetic modeling on the task of large vocabulary (with 20 thousand words) Taiwanese multi-syllabic word recognition. Considering the phonetic characteristics of Taiwanese, the right context dependent (RCD) phones instead of the general tri-phones are used. The RCDs are further clustered at the sub-phone or state level using a decision tree with a set o...

The ACTOR® Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis system, developed at Loquendo S.p.A., is here described. The system employs a unit -selection concatenative synthesis technique, relying on labeled acoustic databases providing phonetic and prosodic coverage of the intended language/domain and on an original algorithm for run-time selection of the acoustic units to be concatenated. This technique yields...

Generative phonology has the goal of developing a comprehensive and predictive model of implicit knowledge of sound structure. In this paper, I review the nature and import of the discoveries about implicit knowledge which were made possible by modern methods for gathering experimental data and for analyzing large data sets. First, it is known that languages di er in extremely ne phonetic detai...