Exploiting lawful variability in the signal: The TRACE model of speech perception
Jeffrey L. Elman, James L. McClelland · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1983
We describe a model of speech perception in which lawful variability in the speech signal is treated as a source of additional information, rather than as noise. Excitatory and inhibitory interactions among nodes for phonetic features, phonemes, and words are used to account for aspects of coarticulation, as well as the interaction of bottom-up and top-down processes in perception of speech. Two results from a working computer simulation of this model are presented. First, we show how the simulation is able to process real (digitized) speech and retune the detection of features and phonemes in accord with the context. Second, we demonstrate how perceptual behavior which appears to be guided by rules can be induced without any explicit rules in the system. [Work supported by the Office of Naval Research.]