Title :
Towards modelling the acoustic differences between the diphthongs of Afrikaans and English L1 and L2 speech
Author :
Prinsloo, Claude P. ; Botha, Elizabeth C.
Author_Institution :
Electr., Electron. & Comput. Eng., Pretoria Univ., South Africa
Abstract :
This paper presents aspects of a study which aims to model the acoustic differences between first language (L1) and second language (L2) speech. Although humans can distinguish between accents fairly easily, they are difficult to determine computationally and quantifiably. The ultimate goal of this study is to enable improvements in automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems by applying the models to assist in speaker adaptation. The so called “true” diphthongs found in Afrikaans are addressed in the study
Keywords :
acoustic signal processing; natural languages; speech processing; speech recognition; Afrikaans; English L1 speech; English L2 speech; accents; acoustic differences modelling; automatic speech recognition systems; first language speech; second language speech; speaker adaptation; true diphthongs; Acoustical engineering; Automatic speech recognition; Cultural differences; Databases; Labeling; Loudspeakers; Natural languages; Speech recognition; Testing; Training data;
Conference_Titel :
Africon, 1999 IEEE
Conference_Location :
Cape Town
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-5546-6
DOI :
10.1109/AFRCON.1999.820797
