This study examined English pronunciation by Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to see how the application of IPA can be used in language education. Twenty university students, divided into two groups, one with the IPA training and the other without the training, were asked to read 30 English words (5 controls) that contain challenging sounds (e.g., l...

This paper presents algorithms for generating targeted name lists for candidate out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words for applications in language processing, particularly speech recognition. Focusing on names, which are shown to be the dominant class of OOVs in news broadcasts, the approach involves offline generation of a large name list and online pruning based on a phonetic distance. The resulting ...

This paper presents a novel combinational phonetic algorithm for Sindhi Language, to be used in developing Sindhi Spell Checker which has yet not been developed prior to this work. The compound textual forms and glyphs of Sindhi language presents a substantial challenge for developing Sindhi spell checker system and generating similar suggestion list for misspelled words. In order to implement ...

Prosodic structure encodes the 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 in American English through analysis of the acoustic correlates of prosodic boundary and their in...

The efficiency of phonetic vocoders stems from the fact that the only transmitted information is the index of the recognised units and the corresponding prosodic parameters. Hence, speaker recognisability is one of the main issues in this class of coders. Our approach to minimise this drawback was to include some speaker adaptation capability. The purpose of this paper is two-folded: on one han...

Spoken language is a resource which is systematically deployed in the management of social interaction— its primary site of occurrence. The patterns and structures in language are emergent properties of and shaped by the exigencies and contingencies of social interaction. However, despite significant advances in modelling speech perception and understanding, and an increasing acknowledgment of ...

The imitation of spoken stop consonants by an articulatory synthesizer using only general learning principles addresses significant issues in speech inversion and speech acquisition. Stop consonants are relatively large, complex acoustic events resulting from discrete articulations, so inversion based on the use of small time windows or based on the minimisation of average articulatory error ac...

Computational phylogenetics is in the process of revolutionizing historical linguistics. Recent applications have shed new light on controversial issues, such as the location and time depth of language families and the dynamics of their spread. So far, these approaches have been limited to single-language families because they rely on a large body of expert cognacy judgments or grammatical clas...