Improving Whispered Speech Recognition Performance Using Pseudo-Whispered Based Data Augmentation

Whispering is a distinct form of speech known for its soft, breathy, and hushed characteristics, often used for private communication. The acoustic characteristics of whispered speech differ substantially from normally phonated speech and the scarcity of adequate training data leads to low automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance. To...

The representation of speech and its processing in the human brain and deep neural networks

For most languages in the world and for speech that deviates from the standard pronunciation, not enough (annotated) speech data is available to train an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. Moreover, human intervention is needed to adapt an ASR system to a new language or type of speech. Human listeners, on the other hand, are able to...

The neural correlates underlying lexically-guided perceptual learning

There is ample evidence showing that listeners are able to quickly adapt their phoneme classes to ambiguous sounds using a process called lexically-guided perceptual learning. This paper presents the first attempt to examine the neural correlates underlying this process. Specifically, we compared the brain’s responses to ambiguous [f/s] sounds...