Learning to speak a new language requires the formation of recognition patterns for the speech sounds specific to the newly acquired language. The present study demonstrates the dynamic nature of cortical memory representations for phonemes in adults by using the mismatch negativity (MMN) event-related potential. We studied Hungarian and Finnish subjects, dividing the Hungarians into a naive (n...

Speech analysis is a prototypical categorical mechanism that has been examined behaviorally in work going back to Haskins Laboratory studies in the 1950s: such work examined the perception of continua between phonemes and demonstrated sharp discontinuities consistent with categorical perception. In this issue of Neuron, Raizada and Poldrack examine analysis mechanisms for such processing by mea...

As infants, we hear continuous sound. It is only through trial and error that we eventually learn phonemes, recognize them, and then start trying to string them together. I attempt to train a Liquid State Machine (LSM) to achieve the second step in the process – picking out particular phonemes from continuous speech. I take several different approaches to explore how various settings within the...

The paper argues on examples of selected past works that stochastic and knowledge-based approaches to automatic speech recognition do not contradict each other. Frequency resolution of human hearing decreases with increasing frequency. Spectral basis designed for optimal discrimination among different phonemes of speech have similar property. Further, human hearing is most sensitive to modulati...

Consonant recognition performance was examined in 18 subjects listening in quiet and speech noise with linear and nonlinear hearing aids. Subjects were divided into three groups by audiometric configuration: flat, moderately sloping, and sharply sloping. Nonlinear amplification schemes included adaptive high-pass filtering (Argosy's Manhattan II, experimentally modified; MANe), MANe circuitry f...

This paper presents a new hierarchical phoneme recognition system using the SVM classifier and different feature representations based on mellin transform. The proposed architecture uses different representations with each group of phonemes of the speech database TIMIT which are distributed in a way to reduce the confusions between phonemes having similar articulatory strcuture. The main idea o...

Many languages have a word class whose speech sounds are linked to sensory experiences (sound symbolism). Here we investigated sound symbolism in touch. Specifically, we performed psychophysical experiments to study the relationship between phonemes of Japanese sound symbolic words and emotional evaluations of objects in contact. Participants expressed the sensation obtained from touched materi...

ABSRACT: Phoneme inventories of the world’s languages as depicted by the UPSID database (Maddieson and Precoda 1990) are analyzed using multivariate statistical techniques of principal components analysis and k-means and hierarchical clustering. The first two meaningful principal components, representing dimensions that account for the most variance in sound systems but are not caused by differ...

We present a neural network model that shows how the prefrontal cortex, interacting with the basal ganglia, can maintain a sequence of phonological information in activation-based working memory (i.e., the phonological loop). The primary function of this phonological loop may be to transiently encode arbitrary bindings of information necessary for tasks the combinatorial expressive power of lan...

Two reading experiments investigated the extent to which the presence of phonemic repetition in sentences influenced processing difficulty during syntactic ambiguity resolution In both experiments, participants read sentences silently as reading time was measured Reading time on sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity was compared to reading time on unambiguous control sentences. S...