INTERSPEECH 2013 14thAnnual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Lyon, France August 25-29, 2013

An Inter- and Cross-disciplinary Perspective of Spoken Language Processing

Hiroya Fujisaki

The University of Tokyo, Japan

More than a quarter century ago, I introduced the term and the concept of “spoken language processing”. Spoken language is our primary medium of communication in which the ultimate source is the speaker’s mind and the destination is the listener’s mind. Unlike written language, it is directly linked with human mechanisms and processes both in production and in comprehension. For example, speech sounds are inseparably related to the speaker’s vocal mechanisms, and therefore convey information on the mental and physical states of the speaker to the listener. Studies on spoken language communication thus involve not only linguistics, phonetics, and acoustics, but also psychology, physiology, physics, and in many cases also pathology and pedagogy. It is my belief that we need to study spoken language from all these viewpoints, and share and integrate the findings in our quest for the solution of a problem, regardless of whether it is basic or applied.

Bibliographic reference.  Fujisaki, Hiroya (2013): "An inter- and cross-disciplinary perspective of spoken language processing", In INTERSPEECH-2013 (abstract).