ON THE ORIGINS OF SPEECH INTELLIGIBILITY IN THE REAL WORLD
Steven Greenberg · 1997
Current-generation speech recognition systems seek to identify words via analysis of their underlying phonological constituents. Although this stratagem works well for carefully enunciated speech emanating from a pristine acoustic environment, it has fared less well for recognizing speech spoken under more realistic conditions, such as (1) moderate to high levels of background noise (2) moderately reverberant acoustic environments (3) spontaneous, informal conversation Under such "real-world" conditions the acoustic properties of speech make it difficult to partition the acoustic stream into readily definable phonological units, thus rendering the process of word recognition highly vulnerable to departures from "canonical" patterns. Analysis of informal, spontaneous speech indicates that the stability of linguistic representation is more likely to reside on the syllabic and phrasal levels than on the phonological. In consequence, attempts to represent words merely as sequences of ...