The vast majority of work in continuous speech recognition uses phoneme-like units as the basic recognition component. The work presented here investigates the practicability of syllable-like units as the building blocks for recognition. A phonetically annotated telephony database is analysed at the syllable level, and a set of syllable-based HMMs are built. Refinements including the introducti...

Two experiments examined if visual word access varies cross-linguistically by studying Spanish/English adult bilinguals, priming two syllable CVCV words both within (Experiment 1) and across (Experiment 2) syllable boundaries in the two languages. Spanish readers accessed more first syllables based on within syllable primes compared to English readers. In contrast, syllable-based primes helped ...

This study investigated the processes underlying the effect of masked syllable priming in French with pseudoword primes and word targets. Two lexical-decision task (LDT) experiments examined whether the syllable priming effect depends on syllable frequency and might rely on a general abstract structure. The results of Experiment 1 revealed an inhibitory priming effect, with pseudoword primes an...

In general purpose concatenated waveform synthesis an exhaustive stored waveforms inventory is needed. Our SPRUCE system is syllable and word based, but for general purpose work its inventory needs examples of all possible syllables. The high-level synthesis engine used to generate the phonology and prosody of utterances is already general purpose – but its use is constrained by small low-level...

In this paper, we construct context-independent single-path and multi-path syllable models aimed at improved pronunciation variation modelling. We use phonetic transcriptions to define the topologies of the syllable models and to initialise the model parameters, and the Baum-Welch algorithm for the re-estimation of the model parameters. We hypothesise that the richer topology of multi-path syll...

Three naming experiments were conducted to examine the role of the first and the second syllable during speech production in Spanish. Facilitative effects of syllable frequency with disyllabic words have been reported in Dutch and Spanish (Levelt & Wheeldon, 1994; Perea & Carreiras, 1998). In both cases, the syllable frequency effect was independent of-and additive to-the effect of word frequen...