A descriptive analysis between syllables in English and Spanish
Fabiola M. Martínez-Licona, John Goddard Close, Alma Edith Martínez Licona · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2002
In recent years different attempts have been made to incorporate temporal information longer than the phoneme into automatic speech recognizers (ASR) for English. The reason for these approaches is related to limitations which arise with existing systems based on phonemes, such as the degradation in performance of ASRs under noisy conditions and variations in pronunciation due to phoneme omission. It is conjectured that humans naturally use longer time periods, corresponding, for example, to syllables, to perceptually integerate information. In the case of Spanish, little seems to have been done in this direction for ASRs. In the present paper, a preliminary comparison is made between syllables in Spanish and English with a view to their factibility in an ASR for Spanish. In particular, a descriptive statistical analysis is conducted with a Spanish speech database to derive the most common structures of the syllables and the most common monosyllables. This is contrasted with previously found results in English. Spectrograms are also used to illustrate pertinent characteristics of Spanish. These results suggest that syllables may indeed provide useful information for an ASR in Spanish and could provide greater success than their counterparts in English. [Work supported by CONACYT under Project 31929-A.] (To be presented in Spanish.)