We report an investigation of the production of real and non-words in two normal speaker groups. Group 1 consists of 6 young females (mean age 26 years) and Group 2 consists of 5 older females (mean age 54 years). The speech material used in the study consisted of two repetitions of 10 real, 10 pseudo-real and 10 non-words. The results from both repetitions for measures of response latency, utt...

Proper early acquisition of speech and language appears to be a necessary process to reach mature speech communication. In modelling the process of natural (and pathological) speech production and speech perception, we frequently concentrate on specific aspects of phonetic knowledge. But also to improve the performance of speech technological systems, an intelligent interpretation of the abunda...

Listeners retune the boundaries between phonetic categories to adjust to individual speakers' productions. Lexical information, for example, indicates what an unusual sound is supposed to be, and boundary retuning then enables the speaker's sound to be included in the appropriate auditory phonetic category. In this study, it was investigated whether lexical knowledge that is known to guide the ...

Automatic speech recognition mainly relies on hidden Markov models (HMM) which make little use of phonetic knowledge. As an alternative, landmark based recognizers rely mainly on precise phonetic knowledge and exploit distinctive features. We propose a theoretical framework to combine both approaches by introducing phonetic knowledge in a non stationary HMM decoder. To demonstrate the potential...

The task of any phonetic theory is to determine the form of a phonetic component by establishing the internal and external constraints on that component. The phonetic component itself converts linguistic knowledge of the structure of the speech act into time-varying commands suitable for control of the articulatory mechanism. Performing involves knowledge, and this knowledge must be expressed i...

this study was an attempt to investigate the effect of vowel-recognition training on beginner and advanced iranian esl learners. a total of 36 adult iranian esl learners (18 advanced and 18 beginners) who were students of various majors at memorial university (mun) were recruited for the study. advanced participants had the experience of living in canada for at least three years while beginners...

It is suggested in this position paper that phonetic knowledge can be put to much more effective use in automatic speech recognition than has been achieved to date. Reported phonetic expert systems typically use production-rules; hypotheses about broad classes of sounds are progressively refined; the systems reason with tokens such as acoustic cues and linguistic features. Following an establis...

Listeners draw on their knowledge of phonetic categories when identifying speech sounds, extracting meaningful structural features from auditory cues. We use a Bayesian model to investigate the extent to which their perceptions of linguistic content incorporate their full knowledge of the phonetic category structure, or only certain aspects of this knowledge. Simulations show that listeners are...

This paper presents a knowledge based approach to consonant recognition. In traditional knowledge based systems, the expert is the linguist/phonetician who attempts to describe and quantify the acoustic events, in the form of production rules into phonetic description. This paper proposes to alter the expert's role so that the expert only needs to provide the basic structure of the phonetic cla...