A Functional Model for Acquisition of Vowel-like Phonemes and Spoken Words Based on Clustering Method

摘要

A new born baby can gradually acquire spoken words in the condition where he/she is merely exposed to many linguistic sounds. In this paper, we propose a functional model of such acquisition of spoken words, in which first, vowel-like phonemes are automatically acquired and then the words are acquired using the words represented by these quasi-vowels. This model was applied to command words used for a robot. We implemented this model into a new clustering algorithm for word HMMs. Using this model, the acquisition of spoken words was performed with reasonably high recognition score even though a few phonemes were used. Then the proposed model was shown to represent the early stage of human process of spoken words’ acquisition.