ISCA Archive SSPR 2003
ISCA Archive SSPR 2003

Issues in recognition of Spanish-accented spontaneous English

Ayako Ikeno, Bryan Pellom, Dan Cer, Ashley Thornton, Jason M. Brenier, Dan Jurafsky, Wayne Ward, William Byrne

We describe a recognition experiment and two analytic experiments on a database of strongly Hispanic-accented English. We show the crucial importance of training on the Hispanicaccented data for acoustic model performance, and describe the tendency of Spanish-accented speakers to use longer, and presumably less-reduced, schwa vowels than native-English speakers.