Subject: Re: Do phonemes = sounds? From: Mark Huckvale <M.Huckvale(at)UCL.AC.UK> Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 12:26:36 +0100Chris 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