An Approach to the Computer Recognition of Single-Syllable English Words
M. Medress · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1970
A method has been developed to abstract distinctive features information about vowels, stops, and fricatives from a filter bank representation of single-syllable, single-morpheme English words. The procedure is organized with respect to and exploits the phonological structure and rules for such words, and no reference to a lexicon is made. Because the program relies primarily on gross spectral properties, it can handle a variety of male speakers with no alterations required. Location, classification, and false alarm scores of better than 92%, 91%, and 7%, respectively, were obtained for repetitions of a list of 105 such words by seven speakers. Based on this experience, 24 words were carefully chosen and subjected to the recognition procedure. An average word recognition score of 85% was obtained for eight speakers. Recognition was significantly improved if lexical information was used in addition to acoustic and phonological information. [Work supported in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories.]