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Re: Do phonemes = sounds?

Chris Stecker wrote:

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?


I was talking about machines, not people, but there is an interesting
answer to how
to get a machine to recognise a new word - you define a set of words
which are each
one phoneme long, then recognise the new word as a sentence. Accuracy
then varies
enormously depending on what additional constraints you can put on word
sequences.

Mark

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




--
Mark Huckvale, Director MSc Speech and Hearing Science
Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London
www.phon.ucl.ac.uk