The multiple regression model was used to study the phoneme and syllable duration characteristics of mandarin Chinese. The source speech material is a phonetically balanced text corpus collected from newspapers and spoken by a professional female announcer. Since the syllable, in an Initial/Final format, was adopted as a basic synthesis unit in our Chinese TTS system, the investigations were ta...

This paper presents a novel technique for building a syllable based continuous speech recognizer when unannotated transcribed train data is available. We present two different segmentation algorithms to segment the speech and the corresponding text into comparable syllable like units. A group delay based two level segmentation algorithm is proposed to extract accurate syllable units from the sp...

In this paper, we present a new syllabification algorithm for Malay language. Syllabification is the process to extract or divide syllable from words. Syllabification process is language dependent where each language can have its own set of syllable structure. Syllabication is an important component in speech synthesizer, speech recognition and transliteration system. Syllabification algorithms...

A severe sparse data problem is faced when building HMMs of syllable units due to the uneven distribution of syllables in natural speech. In this paper we present a novel approach to building syllable HMMs which attempts to overcome this problem. The method involves tying the states in syllable models using a bottom-up clustering algorithm and a state similarity measure employing phonetic infor...

In order to investigate whether syllable frequency effects in visual word recognition can be attributed to phonologically or orthographically defined syllables, we designed one experiment that allowed six critical comparisons. Whereas only a weak effect was obtained when both orthographic and phonological syllable frequency were conjointly manipulated in Comparison 1, robust effects for phonolo...

In current theories of word reading the structure and operations of the phonological buffer are quite underspecified. We investigated this issue by running a reading aloud experiment in Italian. We adopted a priming paradigm, with three-syllabic words as primes and targets and we jointly manipulated two effects ascribed to the stage of phonological and phonetic encoding, that is stress priming ...

The theories of Pulgram (1970) suggest that if the vowel of a French syllable is open then it will induce syllable segmentation responses that result in the syllable being closed, and vice versa. After the empirical verification that our target French-speaking population was capable of distinguishing between mid-vowel aperture, we examined the relationship between vowel and syllable aperture in...

Production and perception of syllables in a second language (L2) that has relatively complex syllable structure, such as English, is expected to be difficult for native speakers of a language with relatively simple syllable structure, such as Japanese. A series of experiments investigated the perception, production, and learning of English syllables by native Japanese speakers. Results showed t...

Three experiments examine the syllable-frequency effect during visual word recognition in Spanish. Disyllabic words and pseudowords were employed manipulating the positional frequency of the first and the second syllable as well as the word frequency (only for words). A standard lexical decision task (Experiment 1) and a temporal separation technique (Experiments 2 & 3), in which either the fir...

Recent studies using the masked priming paradigm have reported facilitating effects of syllable primes in French and English word naming (Ferrand, Segui, & Grainger, 1996; Ferrand, Segui, & Humphreys, 1997). However, other studies have not been able to replicate these effects in Dutch and English (Schiller, 1998, 1999, 2000). In Experiment 1, using the same stimuli and procedure as Ferrand et a...