In three experiments, listeners detected vowel or consonant targets in lists of CV syllables constructed from five vowels and five consonants. Responses were faster in a predictable context (e.g., listening for a vowel target in a list of syllables all beginning with the same consonant) than in an unpredictable context (e.g., listening for a vowel target in a list of syllables beginning with di...

Methods for automated vocal emotion recognition often use acoustic feature vectors that are computed for each frame in an utterance, and global statistics based on these acoustic feature vectors. However, at least two considerations argue for usage of phoneme class specific features for emotion recognition. First, there are well-known effects of phoneme class on some of these features. Second, ...

In unit selection based speech synthesizer, defining a good unit set is crucial to the speech quality. In this paper, a method of customizing the TTS base unit set with a specific speech corpus is proposed. Multi-phoneme units are boosted from the initial phoneme-sized unit. A new multi-phoneme unit is added to the inventory based upon its own frequency count and the affected frequency count of...

We describe a new method for phoneme sequence recognition given a speech utterance, which is not based on the HMM. In contrast to HMM-based approaches, our method uses a discriminative kernel-based training procedure in which the learning process is tailored to the goal of minimizing the Levenshtein distance between the predicted phoneme sequence and the correct sequence. The phoneme sequence p...

PURPOSE The purpose of the present study was to enhance our understanding of phonological working memory in adults who stutter through the comparison of nonvocal versus vocal nonword repetition and phoneme elision task performance differences. METHOD For the vocal nonword repetition condition, participants repeated sets of 4- and 7-syllable nonwords (n=12 per set). For the nonvocal nonword re...

Humans are unique in their ability to communicate using spoken language. However, it remains unclear how the speech signal is transformed and represented in the brain at different stages of the auditory pathway. In this study, we characterized electroencephalography responses to continuous speech by obtaining the time-locked responses to phoneme instances (phoneme-related potential). We showed ...

The concept of the phoneme was central to the development of phonological theory. In the early twentieth century, phonological theory was all about the phoneme: how to define it, how to recognize it, how to discover it (see, for example, the articles selected for inclusion in Joos 1957 and Makkai 1972). The American structuralist term for phonology, phonemics, indicates to what extent the field...

Recent evidence suggests that the ability to segment words into phonemes is significantly related to reading success, and that training in phoneme segmentation appears to have a positive influence on beginning reading. In this study, we evaluated the effect on reading readiness of phoneme segmentation training in kindergarten. Ninety nonreaders with PPVT-R standard scores of 78 or higher were r...

We tested the hypothesis that the categorical perception deficit of speech sounds in developmental dyslexia is related to phoneme awareness skills, whereas a visual attention (VA) span deficit constitutes an independent deficit. Phoneme awareness tasks, VA span tasks and categorical perception tasks of phoneme identification and discrimination using a d/t voicing continuum were administered to ...