We investigated English spoken word recognition of adult Japanese speakers. We found that the accurate recognition of the first syllable played an important role in recognizing a word correctly. It was implied that their recognition performance would be enhanced by time-scale expansion and/or dynamic range compression. The duration of a beginning word is so short that the listener can't recognize it correctly. In the first experiment, we found that they had difficulty in recognizing both isolated words and the extracted words, especially when the word did not begin with a strong syllable. In the second experiment, the extracted words and the corresponding time-scale expanded words were given. The result indicated that the expanded words were better recognized. It is found that the time-scale modification of the extracted words didn't lose intelligibility even around the ratio of 2.00, as was clear from the fact that the recognition improved.
Cite as: Nakayama, K., Tomita-Nakayama, K. (1998) The importance of the first syllable in English spoken word recognition by adult Japanese speakers. Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998), paper 0446, doi: 10.21437/ICSLP.1998-764
@inproceedings{nakayama98_icslp,
author={Kazuo Nakayama and Kaoru Tomita-Nakayama},
title={{The importance of the first syllable in English spoken word recognition by adult Japanese speakers}},
year=1998,
booktitle={Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998)},
pages={paper 0446},
doi={10.21437/ICSLP.1998-764}
}