Prosodic structure encodes grouping of words into hierarchically layered prosodic constituents, including the prosodic word, intermediate phrase (ip) and intonational phrase (IP). This paper investigates the phonetic encoding of prosodic structure from a corpus of scripted broadcast news speech through analysis of the acoustic correlates of prosodic boundary at three levels of prosodic structur...

Speaker recognition techniques have traditionally relied on purely acoustic features and models. During the last few years, however, the field of speaker recognition has started to show interest in the use of higher level features. In particular, phonetic decodings modeled with statistical language models (n-grams) have already shown its effectiveness in several research works. However, the rel...

Computer-assisted language learning (CALL) is reaching an up most position in the pedagogical field of English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESL/EFL). The present study was carried out to study the effect of using phonetic websites on Iranian EFL students’ pronunciation and knowledge of phonemic symbols. Participants of the study included 30 EFL female pre-intermediate students studyin...

This study investigates phonetic and lexical effects on speech perception of high-falling tones and low-falling tones in Hakka and Mandarin. An identification task and a lexical decision task were conducted on 30 participants for each language. The results illustrate that onset pitch and pitch drop are more crucial phonetic attributes than offset pitch for native speakers to distinguish high-fa...

The main goal of this work is to describe a new model for a large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system using a phonetic-phonological approach. This work proposes a statistical phonetic structure, applied at the phoneticphonological level, to improve the speech recognition performance in systems with phonetic-phonological modeling. It is showed that the general likelihood scores are i...

In this paper we propose the use of phoneme graphs for word spotting tasks. The proposed phoneme graphs are built using phonetic probabilities estimated at frame level. We also propose an error model on phoneme graphs which allows to simplify the exploration algorithms used for finding phonetic sequences. A phoneme duration model is also applied for avoiding the detection of too short phonetic ...

An automatic transcription system has been developed to label and segment phonetic constituents of spontaneous American English without benefit of a word-level transcript. Instead, special-purpose neural networks classify each 10-ms frame of speech in terms of articulatory-acoustic-based phonetic features and the feature clusters are subsequently mapped to phonetic-segment labels using multilay...

During language production planning, multiple candidate representations are implicitly activated prior to articulation. Lexical representations that are phonologically related to the target (phonological neighbors) are known to influence phonetic properties of the target word. However, the question of which dimensions of phonological similarity contribute to such lexical-phonetic effects remain...

The last decade has produced an explosion in neuroscience research examining young children's early processing of language. Noninvasive, safe functional brain measurements have now been proven feasible for use with children starting at birth. The phonetic level of language is especially accessible to experimental studies that document the innate state and the effect of learning on the brain. Th...