9310518 Espy-Wilson This is the first year of a three-year continuing award to investigate speaker variability and a feature-based approach to speech recognition. The speaker variability study builds from current knowledge to consideration of a spontaneous speech database with the purpose of categorization and modelling for recognition purposes. It is anticipated that systematic variability will show in this study and that it may be possible to represent it within the lexical representation of words, easing requirements for training of recognition systems. The representation of phenomena such as lenition provides an example of the more general possible agreement between a lexical item and its possible acoustic realizations. A study of speech features in relational terms is carried out to search for sources that may decrease variability and to disclose the remaining, hopefully fewer, factors that may be central to their correlates in order to facilitate feature-based recognition.
