Re: Do phonemes = sounds?

[Chris Stecker <cstecker@xxxxxxxxx>]

So how does one recognize a nonsense syllable like "oob?"  Is it in the
dictionary?  Or would you say I can hear and repeat it, but not recognize
which phonemes it contains?

-Chris

On Monday 06 June 2005 2:00 pm, Mark Huckvale wrote:
> Richard H. wrote:
> >So what's "the truth" here? Can computers create and/or recognise phomemes
> > .. or is the notation too abstract?
>
> I think if you take a pragmatic definition of a phoneme as something
> that is used
> in a pronunciation dictionary, then it is pretty clear that speech
> recognisers can
> recognise phonemes.  However they do so not by recognising elementary
> "sounds"
> but by finding the word which best explains the input acoustic signal.
> And they do
> that using the dictionary sequence of phonemes for the word and a set of
> acoustic
> models which estimate the probability of different acoustic realisations
> of those
> phonemes. So it is only after the word is recognised that the system
> knows which
> phonemes it has recognised.
>
> Sorry, that came out more technical than I'd hoped ...
>
> Mark
> --
>
> Mark Huckvale, Director MSc Speech and Hearing Science
> Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London
> www.phon.ucl.ac.uk