OBJECTIVE In persons with a speech pathology, improved intelligibility is the fundamental goal of treatment. Identification of specific phonetic features that affect intelligibility, contributes to selecting intervention targets. The main purpose of this study was to investigate whether a segmental analysis based on a perceptual phoneme intelligibility assessment is reliable and can be used for...

Most studies on Mandarin HTS (HMM-based text-to-speech system) have taken the initial/final as the basic acoustic units. It is, however, challenging to develop a multilingual HTS in a uniformed and consistent way since most of other languages use the phoneme as the basic phonetic unit. It becomes hard to apply cross-lingual adaptation which need map phonemes from each other, particularly in the...

In 2006, the easyCBM reading assessment system was developed to support the progress monitoring of phoneme segmenting, letter names and sounds recognition, word reading, passage reading fluency, and comprehension skill development in elementary schools. More recently, the Common Core Standards in English Language Arts have been introduced as a framework for outlining grade-level achievement exp...

Individual differences in second language (L2) phoneme perception (within the normal population) have been related to speech perception abilities, also observed in the native language, in studies assessing the electrophysiological response mismatch negativity (MMN). Here, we investigate the brain oscillatory dynamics in the theta band, the spectral correlate of the MMN, that underpin success in...

We all go through a process of perceptual narrowing for phoneme identification. As we become experts in the languages we hear in our environment we lose the ability to identify phonemes that do not exist in our native phonological inventory. This research examined how linguistic experience-i.e., the exposure to a double phonological code during childhood-affects the visual processes involved in...

We describe our approach to construct a phoneme set for polyglot speech synthesis. In polyglot speech synthesis, resources are shared across languages. The goal of this research is to develop global phoneme set using existing resources. Therefore, MBROLA has been selected. In MBROLA, there are 72 diphone databases of different languages. For each database, there is a set of phonemes used. We ha...

Environmental sounds are very helpful in understanding environmental situations and in telling the approach of danger, and sound-imitation words (sound-related onomatopoeia) are important expressions to inform such sounds in human communication, especially in Japanese language. In this paper, we design a method to recognize sound-imitation words (SIWs) for environmental sounds. Critical issues ...

In this paper we tackle the task of bootstrapping an Automatic Speech Recognition system without an a priori given language model, a pronunciation dictionary, or transcribed speech data for the target language Slovene – only untranscribed speech and translations to other resource-rich source languages of what was said are available. Therefore, our approach is highly relevant for under-resourced...

This study investigates how similarly present and absent English phonemes behind noise are perceived by native and non-native speakers. Participants were English native speakers and Japanese native speakers who spoke English as a second language. They listened to English words and non-words in which a phoneme was covered by noise (added; phoneme + noise) or replaced by noise (replaced; noise on...

This paper investigates the usefulness of segmental phonemedynamics for classification of speaking styles. We modeled transition details based on the phoneme sequences emitted by a speech recognizer, using data obtained from a recording of 39 depressed patients with 7 different speaking styles normal, pressured, slurred, stuttered, flat, slow and fast speech. We designed and compared two set of...