In this paper we present a new word recognition system for monosyllabic words consisting of two types of neural networks which allows in an easy way the investigation of three different fusion architectures for audio-visual signals. Furthermore, two different kinds of preprocessing are compared: Besides low level data, a linear discriminant analysis is used for the audio and visual signals to r...

This paper deals with the recognition of French city-names over the telephone. This recognition task, critical in many applications, involves a 40,000 city-name vocabulary, ranging from short monosyllabic words to long official compoundnames. Data collected from a field experiment are analyzed, and several ways of improving speech recognition performance are investigated. This includes a carefu...

Top-down contextual influences play a major part in speech understanding, especially in hearing-impaired patients with deteriorated auditory input. Those influences are most obvious in difficult listening situations, such as listening to sentences in noise but can also be observed at the word level under more favorable conditions, as in one of the most commonly used tasks in audiology, i.e., re...

How syllable-timed is Italian? We investigate two contexts for vowel reduction, unstressed syllables and syllables in polysyllabic words. In a production experiment, a large sample of speakers from Tuscany read diand trisyllabic target words with different stress placement in a sentence context. Results showed vowel reduction in unstressed syllables, both in terms of duration and spectral quali...

The present study investigated 3-year-old children's perception and production of Mandarin lexical tones in monosyllabic words. Thirteen 3-year-old, Mandarin-speaking children participated in the study. Tone perception was examined by a picture-pointing task, and tone production was investigated by picture naming. To compare children's productions with the adult forms, 4 mothers of the children...

The goal of this study is to provide a global view of Spanish second language (L2) accent and to identify the sounds and structures that lead to the perception of foreign accent. We designed a list of real Spanish monosyllabic words with various syllable structures that covers all phonemes in Spanish. The words were produced by L2 learners and native speakers and rated by native listeners. We u...

We report a study of the relationship between form and meaning in the most frequent monosyllabic words in the lexicon of English. There is a small but significant correlation between the phonological distance and the semantic distance between each pair of words. To this extent, words that have similar meanings tend to sound similar. Words differ as to the size of this meaning-form correlation i...

Dichotic listening was evaluated using monosyllabic word pairs that differed in lexical difficulty as defined by the Neighborhood Activation Model of spoken word recognition. Four combinations of lexically EASY and lexically HARD words were evaluated (same pair: EASY-EASY, HARD-HARD; or mixed pair: EASY-HARD, HARD-EASY) in young adult listeners with normal hearing and older adult listeners with...

People were trained to decode noise-vocoded speech by hearing monosyllabic stimuli in distorted and unaltered forms. When later presented with different stimuli, listeners were able to successfully generalize their experience. However, generalization was modulated by the degree to which testing stimuli resembled training stimuli: Testing stimuli's consonants were easier to recognize when they h...

Researchers have long noted that children's grammatical morphemes are variably produced, raising questions about when and how grammatical competence is acquired. This study examined the spontaneous production of determiners by two French-speaking children aged 1;5-2;5. It found that determiners were produced earlier with monosyllabic words, and later with disyllabic and trisyllabic words. This ...