Demisyllables as Processing Units for Automatic Speech Recognition and Lexical Access

This paper describes a number of experimental investigations into syllable-based acoustic-phonetic analysis of German words; these methods can be used as a basic processing stage in a system for automatic speech recognition as well as for speech understanding. In this connection the importance of the syllable in speech processing by man and machine will first be discussed. Then several methods and experiments are presented involving segmentation into syllables and recognition of vowels and consonant clusters, as well as two methods for lexical access and lexical search using these units. The search in the lexicon is necessary in order to find the word in a word-list corresponding to the units recognized, or alternatively to determine the most similar word. The most salient feature of this system is that so-called demisyllables are used as the processing units.