This paper presents a staged series of artificial neural networks (ANNs) for phoneme recognition for text-to-speech applications. Contrary from much of the prior published literature this approach is not restricted to monosyllabic words or the pronunciation of single multi-syllabic words, but can readily be embodied in a program that allows for the reading of a complete text. Also, it does not ...

Although similarity plays an important role in accounts of language processing, there are surprisingly few direct empirical studies of the phonological similarity between words, and it is therefore not clear whether similarity comparisons between words involve processes similar to those involved in other cognitive domains. In five experiments, participants chose which of two monosyllabic pseudo...

Humans readily distinguish spoken words that closely resemble each other in acoustic structure, irrespective of audible differences between individual voices or sex of the speakers. There is an ongoing debate about whether the ability to form phonetic categories that underlie such distinctions indicates the presence of uniquely evolved, speech-linked perceptual abilities, or is based on more ge...

The process of phonological encoding was investigated in primed word naming and word typing with Chinese monosyllabic words. The target words shared or did not share the onset consonants with the prime words. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was 100 ms or 300 ms. Typing required the participants to enter the phonetic letters of the target word, which correspond roughly to the onset and the r...

underlying representations play a crucial role in capturing predictable relations among different phonetic categories in phonological theory. Tone sandhi is a tonal alternation phenomenon in which a tone changes to a different tone in certain phonological environments. This study investigates whether Taiwanese listeners are more sensitive to the surface form of the tones or the underlying tonal...

As one of the major Chinese dialects, Shanghainese is well known for its complex tone sandhi system. This paper applies the command-response model to represent F0 contours of Shanghainese speech. Analysis-by-Synthesis is conducted both on carrier sentences with monosyllabic target words and on isolated polysyllabic words, from which a set of appropriate tone command patterns is derived for word...

This paper proposes a new approach for the integration of the Vietnamese language characteristics into a Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition System (LVCSR) which was built for some European languages. Firstly, a new module of tone recognition using Hidden Markov model was constructed. Secondly, several methods were applied to transform a text corpus of monosyllabic words into text co...

This study investigated French /y/ and /u/ produced by one native speaker (NS) and seven Japanesespeaking learners; four of them received lessons on /u/ with ultrasound visual feedback of the tongue shape and position. Acoustic measurements of 10 repetitions of six words (coronal context) are compared to those of isolated /y/ and /u/, and of the non-words /tyty/ and /tutu/, both before and afte...

Pennsylvania. We would like to thank Juan Segui and the members of the Labo-ratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique for their help, comments, and fruitful discussion, Jean-Luc Aucouturier for his technical help with speech editing and compression routines, and Pierre Clergeot and Denis Acker for access to a large number of subjects and testing facilities at the Ecole Sainte Genevie...

Prior research has purported to show that words with infrequent phoneme-grapheme correspondences are more difficult to spell than words with frequent phoneme-grapheme correspondences. Defining exactly what a phoneme-grapheme relationship is, however, is not necessarily straightforward. There are a number of different assumptions that can be made. In this study, we developed four metrics of soun...