The Berkeley Phonetics Machine is a Linux virtual machine image produced and used by the UC Berkeley Phonology Lab as a platform for phonetic research. It contains a full data analysis stack based on Python and R and also specialized tools for phonetic research. The machine is designed as a flexible and productive platform for established and novel research agendas that can be easily shared and...

5. Some caveats -The phonetics/phonology interface is a broad topic that has been considered from many points of views. -Extensive recent literature in acquisition, psycholinguistics, role of the lexicon, role of speech perception (See among others, recent LabPhon volumes, Burton-Roberts et al. 2000, Hume and Johnson 2001, Bod et al. 2003) -Conclusion recently argued for by Pierrehumbert (2003,...

This study investigates the speech rhythm of Cantonese, Beijing Mandarin, Cantonese-accented English and Mandarin accented English using acoustic rhythmic measures. They were compared with four languages in the BonnTempo corpus: German and English (stress-timed) and French and Italian (syllable-timed). Six Cantonese and six Beijing Mandarin native speakers were recorded reading the North Wind a...

Speech representation provided by acoustic phonetics, spectrogram, is very noisy representation in that it shows every acoustic aspect of speech. Age, gender, size, shape, microphone, room and line are completely irrelevant to speech recognition, pronunciation assessment, and so on. But the spectrogram is affected easily by these factors. This is the very essential reason why speech systems are...

Structuralists famously observed that language is ”un systême oû tout se tient” (Meillet, 1903, p. 407), insisting that the system of relations of linguistic units was more important than their concrete content. This study attempts to derive content from relations, in particular phonetic (acoustic) content from the distribution of alternative pronunciations used in different geographical variet...

Focusing on general phonetics and its role in the world today, this paper explores what the term really means. Against a historical background, it outlines the development of general phonetics from its Victorian inception to the present day. It looks at the theoretical and practical sides of the subject (including ear-training and production training), and summarizes the IPA Certificate examina...

In spite of decades of research, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is far from reaching the goal of performance close to Human Speech Recognition (HSR). One of the reasons for unsatisfactory performance of the state-of-the-art ASR systems, that are based largely on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), is the inferior acoustic modeling of low level or phonetic level linguistic information in the speech...

In the last fifteen years, there have been major paradigm shifts in both general and applied linguistics toward acknowledging intonation as an indispensable component of language and communication. In addition, the hardware and software for conducting acoustic phonetic signal analysis have recently become more accessible. The main goal of this paper is thus to integrate the two seemingly dispar...