Redundancy in this theory means that the specification (either + or -) of certain features of a phoneme is predictable given the specifications of certain other features of the same phoneme and/or of neighbouring phonemes of a phoneme sequence. These restrictions on feature specifications are usually expressed by "redundancy rules". E.g. in English all nasal phonemes voiced which is expressed b...

Word pronunciations, consisting of phoneme sequences and the associated syllabification and stress patterns, are vital for both speech recognition and text-to-speech (TTS) systems. For speech recognition phoneme sequences for words may be learned from audio data. We train recurrent neural network (RNN) based models to predict the syllabification and stress pattern for such pronunciations making...

Considering that the pronunciation of second language speech is usually influenced by the mother tongue, we previously proposed using a reduced phoneme set for second language when the mother tongue of speakers is known. However, the proficiency of second language speakers varies widely, as does the influence of mother tongue on their pronunciation. Consequently, the optimal phoneme set is depe...

This paper presents a distinctive phonetic features (DPFs) based phoneme recognition method by incorporating syllable language models (LMs). The method comprises three stages. The first stage extracts three DPF vectors of 15 dimensions each from local features (LFs) of an input speech signal using three multilayer neural networks (MLNs). The second stage incorporates an Inhibition/Enhancement (...

Efference copies refer to internal duplicates of movement-producing neural signals. Their primary function is to predict, and often suppress, the sensory consequences of willed movements. Efference copies have been almost exclusively investigated in the context of overt movements. The current electrophysiological study employed a novel design to show that inner speech - the silent production of...

Two reading experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of phoneme repetition during silent reading (also referred to as the visual tongue-twister effect, see McCutchen & Perfetti, 1982; Perfetti & McCutchen, 1982) in conjunction with end-of-clause and end-of-sentence wrap-up effects (Just & Carpenter, 1982; Rayner, Sereno, Morris, Schmauder, & Clifton, 1989). In both experiments, read...

In this paper, we propose a segment-based non-parametric method of monophone recognition. We pre-segment the speech utterance into its underlying phonemes using a group-delay-based algorithm. Then, we apply the kNN/SASH phoneme classification technique to classify the hypothesized phonemes. Since phoneme boundaries are already known during the decoding, the search space is very limited and the ...

In this paper, we present a statistical approach for phoneme extraction based on universal constraint. Inspired by former phonological studies, we assume a fictitious point in each phoneme that exhibits the most stable information to explain the phoneme’s existence. With the universal constraint of phoneme definitions, the point is statistically estimated by an iterative procedure to maximize t...

Segmentation of speech into phonemes is beneficial for many spoken language processing applications. Here, a novel method which uses auditory attention features for detecting phoneme boundaries from acoustic signal is proposed. The auditory attention model can successfully detect salient audio events/sounds in an acoustic scene by capturing changes that make such salient events perceptually dif...

This paper describes several approaches to keyword spotting (KWS) for informal continuous speech. We compare acoustic keyword spotting, spotting in word lattices generated by large vocabulary continuous speech recognition and a hybrid approach making use of phoneme lattices generated by a phoneme recognizer. The systems are compared on carefully defined test data extracted from ICSI meeting dat...