The purpose of this study is to characterize the intelligibility a corpus Vowel–Consonant–Vowel (VCV) stimuli recorded in five languages (English, French, German, Italian and Portuguese) order identify subset for screening individuals unknown language during speech-in-noise tests. VCV was estimated by combining psychometric functions derived from Short-Time Objective Intelligibility (STOI) meas...

A vowel training aid system for hearing impaired persons which uses a Windows-based multimedia computer has been developed. The system provides two main displays which give visual feedback for vowels spoken in isolation and short word contexts. Feature extraction methods and neural network processing techniques provide a high degree of accuracy for speaker independent vowel training. The system...

Articulatory information can support learning or remediating pronunciation of a second language (L2). This paper describes an electromagnetic articulometer-based visual-feedback approach using an articulatory target presented in real-time to facilitate L2 pronunciation learning. This approach trains learners to adjust articulatory positions to match targets for a L2 vowel estimated from product...

The current study examined the effect of orthographic transparency and familiarity on brain mechanisms involved in word recognition in adult Hebrew readers. We compared the effects of diacritics that provide transparent but less familiar information and vowel letters that increase orthographic transparency without compromising familiarity. Brain activation was measured in 18 adults during oral ...

The acoustic realization of vowels with lexical stress generally differs substantially from their unstressed counterparts, which are more reduced in spectral quality, shorter in duration, weaker in intensity and tend to have a flatter spectral tilt. Therefore, in an automatic speech recognizer it would appear profitable to train separate models for the stressed and unstressed variants of each v...

Second-language learners often experience major difficulties in producing non-native speech sounds. This paper introduces a training method that uses a real-time analysis of the acoustic properties of vowels produced by non-native speakers to provide them with immediate, trial-by-trial visual feedback about their articulation alongside that of the same vowels produced by native speakers. The Ma...

This paper summarizes our recent progress in improving the automatic transcription of Arabic broadcast audio data, and some efforts to address the challenges of the broadcast conversational speech. Our efforts are aimed at improving the acoustic, pronunciation and language models taking into account specificities of the Arabic language. In previous work we demonstrated that explicit modeling of...

Two experiments explored how children who encounter a new spelling for a phoneme generalize it to novel items. Children ages 5 1/2 to 9 (N = 123) were taught a CVC (consonant–vowel–consonant) nonword containing a new vowel spelling in the middle position (e.g., /gak/ is spelled as giik). They were then asked to spell other nonwords containing the vowel or to judge spellings that had supposedly...

In this paper, two techniques are proposed to enhance the nonnative (Japanese English) speech recognition performance. The first technique effectively integrates orthographic representation of a phoneme as an additional context in state clustering in training tied-state triphones. Non-native speakers often learned the target language not through their ears but through their eyes and it is easil...