Formants in automatic speech recognition

This paper concerns the use of formant frequency information in automatic speech recognition. The discussion is addressed to the physical significance of the formant and to how this relates to the phonetic concepts of segment and equivalence that are needed for the recognition of phonetic types. Specifically, the definition of the phone in terms of articulatory dynamics can be interpreted acoustically in terms of formant dynamics. Hence formant :transition information can aid segmentation. Also, formant frequencies for given utterances by single speakers display remarkable interrepetition stability, while the speaker identity, phonetic type, and the phonetic, prosodic, and linguistic contexts are sources of nonrandom variability that should be included in a complete acoustic phonetic description of formant behavior.

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