Recognition of a small vocabulary spoken by two dialect groups

Abstract

A major difference among American English dialects lies in the variety of phonetic characteristics of vowels (H. Kurath, Studies in Area Linguistics, 1972). Since LPC‐based speech recognition systems depend heavily on the vowel portion of an utterance, dialect differences not represented in a template inventory could affect recognition accuracy in a speaker‐independent, LPC‐based isolated word recognition system. Eighty‐five speakers from each of two dialect groups, Eastern New England and Southeastern, recorded the digits and two command words. Word recognition scores for speakers in each dialect group were compared when reference templates were from (1) the other dialect group; (2) the same dialect group; and (3) a combination of the two groups. Comparisons are made on a word‐by‐word basis to determine what types of phonetic dialect variation affect recognition accuracy.