While developing lexical resources for a particular language variety (Viennese), we experimented with a set of 5 different phonetic encodings, termed phone sets, used for unit selection speech synthesis. We started with a very rich phone set based on phonological considerations and covering as much phonetic variability as possible, which was then reduced to smaller sets by applying transformati...

This study examined English pronunciation by Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to see how the application of IPA can be used in language education. Twenty university students, divided into two groups, one with the IPA training and the other without the training, were asked to read 30 English words (5 controls) that contain challenging sounds (e.g., l...

This paper presents algorithms for generating targeted name lists for candidate out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words for applications in language processing, particularly speech recognition. Focusing on names, which are shown to be the dominant class of OOVs in news broadcasts, the approach involves offline generation of a large name list and online pruning based on a phonetic distance. The resulting ...

This paper presents a novel combinational phonetic algorithm for Sindhi Language, to be used in developing Sindhi Spell Checker which has yet not been developed prior to this work. The compound textual forms and glyphs of Sindhi language presents a substantial challenge for developing Sindhi spell checker system and generating similar suggestion list for misspelled words. In order to implement ...

Prosodic structure encodes the grouping of words into hierarchically layered prosodic constituents, including the prosodic word, intermediate phrase (ip) and intonational phrase (IP). This paper investigates the phonetic encoding of prosodic structure from a corpus of scripted broadcast news speech in American English through analysis of the acoustic correlates of prosodic boundary and their in...

The most widely used acoustic unit in current automatic speech recognition systems is the triphone, which includes the immediate preceding and following phonetic contexts. Although triphones have proved to be an efficient choice, it is believed that they are insufficient in capturing all of the coarticulation effects. A wider phonetic context seems to be more appropriate, but often suffers from...

Developing a phonetic lexicon for a language requires linguistic knowledge as well as human effort, which may not be available, particularly for under-resourced languages. To avoid the need for the linguistic knowledge, acoustic information can be used to automatically obtain the subword units and the associated pronunciations. Towards that, the present paper investigates the potential of a rec...

Infants and adults are well able to match auditory and visual speech, but the cues on which they rely (viz. temporal, phonetic and energetic correspondence in the auditory and visual speech streams) may differ. Here we assessed the relative contribution of the different cues using sine-wave speech (SWS). Adults (N=52) and infants (N=34, age ranged in between 5 and 15months) matched 2 trisyllabi...