Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) word utterances are unavoidable in speech recognition since the vocabulary size of a recognition dictionary is limited. And therefore, automatic vocabulary adaptation, which selects unregistered (i.e. OOV) words from relevant documents and registers them to a dictionary with their proper probability values, is an important technique. To improve recognition accuracy, a vo...

Due to recent advancements in speech technologies, a large number of spoken dialogue systems have been constructed. However, since most of them adopt existing text-to-speech synthesizers, it is rather difficult to reflect the linguistic information obtained during the reply sentence generation well in output speech. A framework is necessary for correctly reflecting higher-level linguistic infor...

Signed languages exhibit iconicity (resemblance between form and meaning) across their vocabulary, and many non-Indo-European spoken languages feature sizable classes of iconic words known as ideophones. In comparison, Indo-European languages like English and Spanish are believed to be arbitrary outside of a small number of onomatopoeic words. In three experiments with English and two with Span...

A great deal of work has shown that the size of the phonological neighborhood affects the speed and accuracy of spoken word recognition. Words with many similar sounding words (i.e., a dense neighborhood) are recognized more slowly and less accurately than words with few similar sounding words (i.e., a sparse neighborhood). However, little work has examined the structural differences that may e...

The word length effect is one of the cornerstones of trace decay plus rehearsal models (TDR) of memory. Words of long spoken duration take longer to rehearse than words of short spoken duration and as such suffer more decay and are thus less well recalled. The current experiment manipulates both syllable length and spoken duration within words of fixed syllable length in an aim to test the assu...

Given the importance of syllables in the development of reading, spelling, and phonological awareness, information is needed about how children syllabify spoken words. To what extent is syllabification affected by knowledge of spelling, to what extent by phonology, and which phonological factors are influential? In Experiment 1, six- and seven-year-old children did not show effects of spelling ...