The most frequently used methods of automatic detection and classification of speech disorders are based on experimental determination of specific distinctive features for a given kind of disorder, and working out a suitable algorithm that finds such a disorder in the acoustic signal. For example, for detection of prolonged phonemes, analysis of the duration of articulation is used, and on the ...

When learning language young children are faced with many formidable challenges, including discovering words embedded in a continuous stream of sounds and determining what role these words play in syntactic constructions. We suggest that knowledge of phoneme distributions may play a crucial part in helping children segment words and determining their lexical category. We performed a two-step an...

We study rank-frequency relations for phonemes, the minimal units that still relate to linguistic meaning. We show that these relations can be described by the Dirichlet distribution, a direct analogue of the ideal-gas model in statistical mechanics. This description allows us to demonstrate that the rank-frequency relations for phonemes of a text do depend on its author. The author-dependency ...

Recent evidence shows that listeners use abstract prelexical units in speech perception. Using the phenomenon of lexical retuning in speech processing, we ask whether those units are necessarily phonemic. Dutch listeners were exposed to a Dutch speaker producing ambiguous phones between the Dutch syllable-final allophones approximant [r] and dark [l]. These ambiguous phones replaced either fina...

In machine lip-reading there is continued debate and research around the correct classes to be used for recognition. In this paper we use a structured approach for devising speaker-dependent viseme classes, which enables the creation of a set of phoneme-to-viseme maps where each has a different quantity of visemes ranging from two to 45. Viseme classes are based upon the mapping of articulated ...

In Sanskrit, the phonemes at the word boundaries undergo changes to form new phonemes through a process called as sandhi. A fused sentence can be segmented into multiple possible segmentations. We propose a word segmentation approach that predicts the most semantically valid segmentation for a given sentence. We treat the problem as a query expansion problem and use the path-constrained random ...

This paper presents a method of classifying phonemes by combining a dynamical system approach with sub-band decomposition of speech signals. The ability of reconstructed phase spaces to effectively model sub-bands of phonemes in different phonological classes is studied. The current results are taken from a small speaker-independent set. For the final version of this paper, the entire TIMIT dat...

One approach to the transcription of written text into sounds (phonetization) is to use a set of welldefined language-dependent rules, which are in most situations augmented by a dictionary of exceptional words that constitute their on rules. The process of transcribing into sounds starts by pre-processing the text into lexical items to which the rules are applicable. The rules can be segregate...

Many languages have a word class whose speech sounds are linked to sensory experiences (sound symbolism). Here we investigated sound symbolism in taste. Specifically, we performed psychological experiments to study the relationship between phonemes of Japanese sound symbolic words and emotional evaluations of objects in taste. In the experiment, when participants drank something, they were aske...