This study addresses two issues related to both machine- and subjective-based speech evaluation by investigating five phonological phenomena related to allophone production. Its aim is to use objective parametrization and phonological classification of the recorded allophones. These allophones were selected as specifically difficult for Polish speakers of English: aspiration, final obstruent devoicing, dark lateral /l/, velar nasal...

The bi-modal speech recognition system requires a 2-sample language input for training and for testing algorithms which precisely depicts natural English speech. For the purposes of the audio-visual recordings, a training data base of 264 sentences (1730 words without repetitions; 5685 sounds) has been created. The language sample reflects vowel and consonant frequencies in natural speech. The recording material reflects both the...

An allophonic description of English plosive consonants, based on audio-visual recordings of 600 specially selected words, was developed. First, several speakers were recorded while reading words from a teleprompter. Then, every word was played back from the previously recorded sample read by a phonology expert and each examined speaker repeated a particular word trying to imitate correct pronunciation. The next step consisted...

Automatic classification methods, such as artificial neural networks (ANNs), the k-nearest neighbor (kNN) and selforganizing maps (SOMs), are applied to allophone analysis based on recorded speech. A list of 650 words was created for that purpose, containing positionally and/or contextually conditioned allophones. For each word, a group of 16 native and non-native speakers were audio-video recorded, from which seven native speakers’...

The purpose of this study is to involve both Convolutional Neural Networks and a typical learning algorithm in the allophone classification process. A list of words including aspirated and non-aspirated allophones pronounced by native and non-native English speakers is recorded and then edited and analyzed. Allophones extracted from English speakers’ recordings are presented in the form of two-dimensional spectrogram images and...