Subject: Re: Do phonemes = sounds? From: Mark Huckvale <M.Huckvale(at)UCL.AC.UK> Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 22:00:56 +0100Richard 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