Lexical Access Model for Italian -- Modeling human speech processing:
identification of words in running speech toward lexical access based on the
detection of landmarks and other acoustic cues to features
Modelling the process that a listener actuates in deriving the words intended
by a speaker requires setting a hypothesis on how lexical items are stored in
memory. This work aims at developing a system that imitates humans when
identifying words in running speech and, in this way, provide a framework to
better understand human speech processing. We build a speech recognizer for
Italian based on the principles of Stevens' model of Lexical Access in which
words are stored as hierarchical arrangements of distinctive features (Stevens,
K. N. (2002). "Toward a model for lexical access based on acoustic landmarks
and distinctive features," J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 111(4):1872-1891). Over the
past few decades, the Speech Communication Group at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) developed a speech recognition system for English based on
this approach. Italian will be the first language beyond English to be
explored; the extension to another language provides the opportunity to test
the hypothesis that words are represented in memory as a set of
hierarchically-arranged distinctive features, and reveal which of the
underlying mechanisms may have a language-independent nature. This paper also
introduces a new Lexical Access corpus, the LaMIT database, created and labeled
specifically for this work, that will be provided freely to the speech research
community. Future developments will test the hypothesis that specific acoustic
discontinuities - called landmarks - that serve as cues to features, are
language independent, while other cues may be language-dependent, with powerful
implications for understanding how the human brain recognizes speech.Comment: Submitted to Language and Speech, 202
