This three-year continuing grant will support a study of word recognition in continuous speech. New principles of phonetic and acoustic indexing will be developed through analysis of selected utterances gathered under controlled conditions. Landmark features in acoustic signals will be identified and characterized, together with quantifiable relationships of other features to these landmarks. The investigators will produce a small lexicon indexed by these phonetic features, test its effectiveness in word recognition, and begin development of a system for automatic extraction of phonetic features. The ultimate impact may be a new theory of phonetic encoding and a more efficient method of automatic speech recognition.
