Glimpsing speech

The purpose of this paper is to provide further support for the notion of multiple looks or ‘glimpses’ in everyday speech perception, and to highlight some of the obstacles that confront any system, computational or biological, wishing to exploit them. Moore (2003) provides arguments for an intelligent temporal integration of speech, motivated by the ‘multiple looks’ model of Viemeister and Wakefield (1991). Their model involved the detection of brief tones in noise, but Moore argues that such a process might also apply to speech perception. The idea that listeners are able to integrate glimpses of speech to form linguistic percepts was suggested by Miller and Licklider (1950), who demonstrated the high intelligibility of interrupted speech. Informally, a glimpse may be defined as an arbitrary time–frequency region which contains a reasonably undistorted view of the target signal. Section 2 describes some studies which contribute to the appeal of glimpses, while the problem of defining a glimpse is tackled in Section 3. The glimpses notion has also influenced computational approaches to robust automatic speech recognition (ASR), leading to the development of missing data theory (Cooke, Green, & Crawford, 1994; Cooke, Green, Josifovski, & Vizinho, 2001). A recent implementation of these ideas (Barker, Cooke, & Green, 2001) was one of the top performers in the 2001 AURORA global evaluation of robust ASR. Computational aspects of glimpsing are discussed further in section 4.