Computer‐Assisted Reading of Spectrograms

A simple user‐oriented computer language has been developed (using LISP) to be used as an aid in reading spectrograms of sentences containing words from a fixed vocabulary. The lexicon is stored in the computer in terms of phonetic segments and features. Questions such as “Give me all two‐word combinations that contain the following sequence of phonetic segments or features….” are easily translatable into simple and concise commands in this language. All commands are expressed in terms of phonetic segments or features which the user deduces from the spectrogram. In cases where segmentation is not obvious, a feature may be specified over a variable number of segments. It has been found that the use of such a language in conjunction with the reading of spectrograms provides insight into the kinds of acoustic analysis that are necessary in developing strategies for the machine recognition of connected speech. The language and some implications of its usage, based on experience with a 200‐word vocabulary, wil...