ISCA & IEEE Workshop on Spontaneous Speech Processing and Recognition April 13-16, 2003 Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan

Issues in Recognition of Spanish-Accented Spontaneous English

Ayako Ikeno (1), Bryan Pellom (1), Dan Cer (2), Ashley Thornton (1), Jason M. Brenier (1), Dan Jurafsky (1), Wayne Ward (1), William Byrne (3)

(1) Center for Spoken Language Research, University of Colorado at Boulder
(2) Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado at Boulder
(3) Center for Language and Speech Research, The Johns Hopkins University

We describe a recognition experiment and two analytic experiments on a database of strongly Hispanic-accented English. We show the crucial importance of training on the Hispanicaccented data for acoustic model performance, and describe the tendency of Spanish-accented speakers to use longer, and presumably less-reduced, schwa vowels than native-English speakers.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Ikeno, Ayako / Pellom, Bryan / Cer, Dan / Thornton, Ashley / Brenier, Jason M. / Jurafsky, Dan / Ward, Wayne / Byrne, William (2003): "Issues in recognition of Spanish-accented spontaneous English", in SSPR-2003, paper MAP7.