Phone based acoustic modeling for automatic speech recognition for Punjabi language

Punjabi language is a tonal language belonging to an Indo-Aryan language family and has a number of speakers all around the world. Punjabi language has gained acceptability in the media & communication and therefore deserves to have a place in the growing field of automatic speech recognition which has been explored already for a number of other Indian and foreign languages successfully. Some work has been done in the field of isolated word speech recognition for Punjabi language, but only using whole word based acoustic models. A phone based approach has yet to be applied for Punjabi language speech recognition. This paper describes an automatic speech recognizer that recognizes isolated word speech and connected word speech using a triphone based acoustic model on the HTK 3.4.1 speech Engine and compares the performance with acoustic whole word model based ASR system. Word recognition accuracy of isolated word speech was 92.05% for acoustic whole word model based system and 97.14% for acoustic triphone model based system whereas word recognition accuracy of connected word speech was 87.75% for acoustic whole word model based system and 91.62% for acoustic triphone model based system.

Is the noun ending a cue to grammatical gender processing? An ERP study on sentences in Italian

© 2015 Society for Psychophysiological Research. Gender-to-ending consistency has been shown to influence grammatical gender retrieval in isolated word presentation. Notwithstanding the wealth of evidence, the exact role and the time course of processing of this distributional information remain unclear. This ERP study investigated if and when the brain detects gender-to-ending consistency in sentences containing Italian determiner-noun pairs. Determiners either agreed or disagreed in gender with the nouns whose endings were reliable or misleading cues to gender (transparent and irregular nouns). Transparent nouns elicited an increased frontal negativity and a late posterior positivity compared to irregular nouns (350-950 ms), suggesting that the system is sensitive to gender-to-ending consistency from relatively early stages of processing. Gender agreement violations evoked a similar LAN-P600 pattern for both types of nouns. The present findings provide evidence for an early detection of reliable gender-related endings during sentence reading.

Is the noun ending a cue to grammatical gender processing? An ERP study on sentences in Italian

© 2015 Society for Psychophysiological Research. Gender-to-ending consistency has been shown to influence grammatical gender retrieval in isolated word presentation. Notwithstanding the wealth of evidence, the exact role and the time course of processing of this distributional information remain unclear. This ERP study investigated if and when the brain detects gender-to-ending consistency in sentences containing Italian determiner-noun pairs. Determiners either agreed or disagreed in gender with the nouns whose endings were reliable or misleading cues to gender (transparent and irregular nouns). Transparent nouns elicited an increased frontal negativity and a late posterior positivity compared to irregular nouns (350-950 ms), suggesting that the system is sensitive to gender-to-ending consistency from relatively early stages of processing. Gender agreement violations evoked a similar LAN-P600 pattern for both types of nouns. The present findings provide evidence for an early detection of reliable gender-related endings during sentence reading.

Language control in bilingual production: Insights from error rate and error type in sentence production

Most research showing that cognates are named faster than non-cognates has focused on isolated word production which might not realistically reflect cognitive demands in sentence production. Here, we explored whether cognates elicit interference by examining error rates during sentence production, and how this interference is resolved by language control mechanisms. Twenty highly proficient Spanish–English bilinguals described visual scenes with sentence structures ‘NP1-verb-NP2’ (NP = noun-phrase). Half the nouns and half the verbs were cognates and two manipulations created high control demands. Both situations that demanded higher inhibitory control pushed the cognate effect from facilitation towards interference. These findings suggest that cognates, similar to phonologically similar words within a language, can induce not only facilitation but robust interference.