文档介绍：ARTICULATION AND
INTELLIGIBILITY
Copyright © 2005 by Morgan & Claypool
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Articulation and Intelligibility
Jont B. Allen
ISBN: 1598290088
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
First Edition
**********
Printed in the United States of America
ARTICULATION AND
INTELLIGIBILITY
Jont B. Allen
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana
M
&C Morgan & Claypool Publishers
ABSTRACT
Immediately following the Second World War, between 1947 and 1955, several
classic papers quantified the fundamentals of human speech information process-
ing and recognition. In 1947 French and Steinberg published their classic study
on the articulation index. In 1948 Claude Shannon published his famous work
on the theory of information. In 1950 Fletcher and Galt published their theory of
the articulation index, a theory that Fletcher had worked on for 30 years, which
integrated his classic works on loudness and speech perception with models of
speech intelligibility. In 1951 e Miller then wrote the first book Language and
Communication, analyzing human munication with Claude Shannon’s
just published theory of information. Finally in 1955 e Miller published the
first extensive analysis of phone decoding, in the form of confusion matrices, as a
function of the speech-to-noise ratio. This work extended the Bell Labs’ speech
articulation studies with ideas from Shannon’s Information theory. Both Miller and
Fletcher showed that speech, as a code, is incredibly robust to mangling distortions
of filtering and noise.
Regrettably much of this early work was forgotten. While the key science
of information