The demand and the importance of Chinese teaching have increased continuously. In order to assist the Chinese learners in composing Chinese characters and increase their learning efficiency, Chinese components teaching method is adopted. The learners can find the clues to both the pronunciations and the meanings of Chinese characters from Chinese components, and semantic-phonetic compounds and ...

In the presence of pronunciation variation and the masking effects of additive noise, we investigate the role of phonetic information reduction and lexical confusability on ASR performance. Contrary to previous work [1], we show that place of articulation as a representation for unstressed segments performs at least as well as manner of articulation in the presence of additive noise. Methods of...

As the initial step in studying the acquisition of phonological categories from the speech signal, we describe representational issues for the target of learning, a probabilistic distribution of phonological categories over a phonetic parameter space. Our model system of study is cross-linguistic lexical tonal phonemes in tonal languages. We focus on two representational issues: temporal resolu...

This paper presents the phonetic analysis of the intonational patterns conveying the pragmatic contents of continuation and/or marking syntactic relations in Rome and Perugia Italian: data show the type and the distribution of accents and boundaries occurring in spontaneous task-oriented dialogues. Results imply considerations about issues concerning systemic, phonotactic and realizational aspe...

This paper reviews the historical development of phonetic vowel systems from 1617 to 2005. In times where the vowel system of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is the de facto standard in phonetic sciences it is important to learn more about predecessors and alternative considerations of how vowel systems could be organized. This concerns matters of transcriptions, ideas on parameters o...

The segmentation of uttered speech into phonetic units is a key processing task for successfully implementing speech recognition systems. This paper presents a smart approach to phonetic segmentation of uttered speech that separates vowels from consonants. Time-domain feature-extraction algorithms are applied to speech to extract features at minimum computational cost. Fuzzy decision logic is u...

This work presents a novel framework to guide the Viterbi decoding process of a hidden Markov model based speech recognition system by means of broad phonetic classes. In a first step, decision trees are employed, along with frame and segment based attributes, in order to detect broad phonetic classes in the speech signal. Then, the detected phonetic classes are used to reinforce paths in the s...

In this paper we address the issue of how to select a minimal set of phonetic events from a phone posteriorgram while minimizing the loss of information. We derive phone posteriorgrams from two sources, Gaussian mixture models and sparse multilayer perceptrons, and apply phone-specific matched filters to the posteriorgrams to yield a smaller set of phonetic events. We introduce a mutual informa...

INTRODUCTION  Treatment of phonological disorders considering extra-linguistic and linguistic variables are important to ensure that the alteration is resolved promptly and in the best manner as possible. AIM  To analyze therapeutic advances (phonetic inventory, phonological system, and distinctive features) in children with phonological disorders by considering the therapeutic approach used,...

In this paper, we analyze whether dictionaries from the World Wide Web which contain phonetic notations, may support the rapid creation of pronunciation dictionaries within the speech recognition and speech synthesis system building process. As a representative dictionary, we selected Wiktionary [1] since it is at hand in multiple languages and, in addition to the definitions of the words, many...