Bio-inspired phonologic processing: From vowel representation spaces to categories

Abstract

Vowels are important clues supporting speech perception. Nevertheless there are not good definitions for the vowel under the perceptual and computational points of view, among others. The purpose of the present paper is to give an explanation on how the concept of vowel may be defined under the perceptual point of view as those patterns assigned to a specific and categorical representation space which is competitively instantiated in the cortical structures, depending on the specific phonological framework of the listener's language. An experiment is designed to test this definition on a neuromorphic speech processor. Results are presented and discussed. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.