The present work reviews theories and empirical findings, including results from two new experiments, that bear on the perception of English vowels, with an emphasis on the comparison of data analytic "machine recognition" approaches with results from speech perception experiments. Two major sources of variability (viz., speaker differences and consonantal context effects) are addressed from th...

In this paper we report on a study on pronunciation errors by Spanish learners of Dutch, which was aimed at obtaining information to develop a dedicated Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) program for this fixed language pair (Spanish L1, Dutch L2). The results of our study indicate, that, first, vowel errors are more frequent and variable than consonant mispronunciations. Second, S...

This study was designed to examine the role of duration in vowel perception by testing listeners on the identification of CVC syllables generated at different durations. Test signals consisted of synthesized versions of 300 utterances selected from a large, multitalker database of /hVd/ syllables [Hillenbrand et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 97, 3099-3111 (1995)]. Four versions of each utterance wer...

The aim of the present work was to find the answer to the question: To what extent can the multilayer perceptron be applicable in the automatic vowel recognition process in any given fragments of a particular speaker? Initial research was carried out with the use of recordings of 3 adult people’s speech. Vowel recognition was performed with the application of multilayer perceptron. On the input...

The intelligibility of speech having either a single "hole" in various bands or having two "holes" in disjoint or adjacent bands in the spectrum was assessed with normal-hearing listeners. In experiment 1, the effect of spectral "holes" on vowel and consonant recognition was evaluated using speech processed through six frequency bands, and synthesized as a sum of sine waves. Results showed a mo...

A widely-cited study investigating effects of recognition difficulty on the phonetic realization of words (Wright, 1997, 2004) described vowel dispersion in a subset of the Easy/Hard database (Torretta, 1995). The core finding was that vowel dispersion, i.e. distance from the center of the talker’s F1/F2 space, was greater in words that represent difficult recognition targets, due to competitio...

An isolated-word speech recognition system, built without the use of linear segments for acoustic modelling or lexical access, is justified, described and demonstrated. The system comprises phonetic feature analysis operating on four independent tiers, parallel phonotactic parsing, and lexical access based on a neural-network inspired lexicon structure. Performance is however still inferior to ...

Handwritten character recognition is the important area in image processing and pattern recognition fields. This field of research is applicable to various application areas where the aim is too atomized and reduces the human efforts for form filling, job application, bank and postal automation [1-3] etc. Handwritten character recognition in Indian script [4] is a challenging task specially Dev...

Whispered speech lacks the vocal chord vibration which is typically used to distinguish voiced and unvoiced consonants, making their discrimination a challenging task. In this work, we objectively and subjectively quantify the amount of discrimination between a voiced (V) consonant and its unvoiced (UV) counterpart using seven V-UV consonant pairs in six Indian languages, in neutral and whisper...

The intelligibility of speech having either a single " hole " in various bands or having two " holes " in disjoint or adjacent bands in the spectrum was assessed with normal-hearing listeners. In Experiment 1, the effect of spectral "holes " on vowel and consonant recognition was evaluated using speech processed through six frequency bands, and synthesized as a sum of sinewaves. Results showed ...