Mechanisms of Speech Recognition

Book excerpt: Mechanisms of Speech Recognition explores the mechanisms underlying speech recognition. Topics covered include the auditory system, speech production, auditory psychophysics, speech synthesis and analysis, vowel and consonant recognition, and perception of prosodic features and of distorted speech. Automatic speech recognition and models of speech recognition are also given consideration. This volume consists of 11 chapters and begins with an overview of speech recognition, communication, and production. More specifically, it examines the way in which the organs of the vocal apparatus are employed to transform a message consisting of a string of linguistic units, such as words or phonemes, into a wave of continuous sounds which are recognized as speech. The auditory system and its parts are then described, from the ears to the organ of Corti and nerve cells. The chapters that follow focus on the behavior of the hearing system, the various techniques of analyzing speech sounds, and speech synthesizers such as vocoders. The mechanisms underlying the recognition of vowels and consonants are also described, along with the physical parameters of the speech wave which signal the prosody of an utterance, the effects of distortions in the speech wave on speech perception, and tools used in automatic speech recognition. The book concludes with an evaluation of models of speech recognition. This book will be of interest to phoneticians, linguists, physiologists, psychologists, and physicists.