Acoustic-Phonetic Knowledge Representation: Implications from Spectrogram Reading Experiments

This paper presents a summary of several spectrogram reading experiments designed mainly to uncover the amount of phonetic information that is contained in the speech signal. The task involved identifying the phonetic contents of an utterance only from a visual examination of the spectrogram. The results generally support the notion that there is a great deal of phonetic information in the speech signal that can be extracted by the proper application of phonetic rules. From these results, it is argued that phonetic recognition in speech recognition systems can be improved substantially, and that improved phonetic recognition will lead to speech recognition systems of greatly increased complexity and sophistication.

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