Background noise challenges auditory recognition of speech and may reveal the underlying deficits in word skills. Previous studies have reported an association between children’s skills various linguistic skills, including phonology, although some languages only. However, language-specific features influence these connections. This study describes associations ability phonological a representat...

Acknowledgments Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: The SPHINX Speech Recognition System 1 2 3 5 2.1 Signal Processing ............................ 5 2.2 Clustering and Vector Quantization ..................... 6 2.3 Hidden Markov Models .......................... 7 2.4 Speech Unit ............................... 7 Chapter 3: The Motorola Car Database and AN4 Database 8 3.1 The Motorola Car Data...

In this paper, a noise adaptive speech recognition approach is proposed for recognizing speech which is corrupted by additive non-stationary background noise. The approach sequentially estimates noise parameters, through which a nonlinear parametric function adapts mean vectors of acoustic models. In the estimation process, posterior probability of state sequence given observation sequence and ...

OBJECTIVES The purpose of Experiment 1 was to measure word recognition in younger adults with normal hearing when speech or babble was temporally or spectrally distorted. In Experiment 2, older listeners with near-normal hearing and with hearing loss (for pure tones) were tested to evaluate their susceptibility to changes in speech level and distortion types. The results across groups and liste...

The accuracy of simulation-based assessments of speech recognition systems under noisy conditions is investigated with a focus on the influence of the Lombard effect on the speech recognition performances. This investigation was carried out under various recognition conditions of different sound pressure levels of ambient noise, for different recognition tasks, such as continuous speech recogni...

Listening abilities in humans have developed in rural environments which are the dominant setting for the vast majority of human evolution. Hence, the natural acoustic constraints present in such ecological soundscapes are important to take into account in order to study human speech. Here, we measured the impact of basic properties of a typical ‘natural quiet’ and non reverberant soundscape on...

In the study of recognition memory, a mirror effect is commonly observed for word frequency, with low frequency items yielding both a higher hit rate and lower false alarm rate than high frequency items. The finding that LF items consistently outperform HF items in recognition was once termed the “frequency paradox”, as LF items are less well represented in memory. However, recognition is known...

The performance of an isolated word speech recognition (IWSR) system is known to drop rapidly with increase in the degradation of the input speech. In this paper we propose a recognition scheme wh1.h adapts itself to mild degradations in speech. The scheme does not need apriori information regarding the nature and extent of noise. We suggest techniques which adaptively discriminate between nois...