The Sphere of Speech
Mohamed Zakaria Kurdi · 2016
This chapter focuses on practical applications of linguistic studies, including speech pathology, language teaching and speech processing (SP). Two key disciplines are at the heart of studies in this area, namely phonetics and phonology. Phonetics provides methods for the description, classification and transcription of speech sounds. The chapter shows how the three main branches of phonetics are distinct, namely articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics and auditory phonetics. It focuses on the two applications which fit into natural language processing (NLP) the best: speech recognition and speech synthesis. Speaker recognition involves identifying the person who utters a phonic sequence whose length varies from long to very short. Such applications require vocal characteristics to be modeled. Another application of SP involves identifying the language or dialect of the speaker. The most obvious use for automatic speech recognition (ASR) is in the context of human-machine spoken dialogue applications, where data are introduced by means of spoken utterances.