{"pk":27626,"title":"ASR Systems as Models of Phonetic Category Perception in Adults","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Adult speech perception is tuned to efficiently process native phonetic categories, causing difficulties with certainnon-native categories. For example, Japanese has no equivalent of the distinction between American English /r/ and /l/ and na-tive speakers of Japanese have a hard time discriminating between these two sounds. Here, we ask whether standard AutomaticSpeech Recognition (ASR) systems trained on large corpora of continuous speech can make correct quantitative predictionsregarding such non-native phonetic category perception effects. By training an ASR system on language L1 and evaluatingit on language L2, we obtain predictions for a native L1 speaker tested on L2 phonetic contrasts. Using a variety of L1 andL2, we show that ASR models correctly predict several well-documented effects. Beyond the immediate results, our evaluationmethodology, based on a machine version of ABX discrimination tasks, opens the possibility of a more systematic investigationof computational models of phonetic category perception.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Posters: Member Abstracts","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0jt7r6cm","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Thomas","middle_name":"","last_name":"Schatz","name_suffix":"","institution":"Ecole Normale Sup ́erieure","department":""},{"first_name":"Francis","middle_name":"","last_name":"Bach","name_suffix":"","institution":"Ecole Normale Sup ́erieure","department":""},{"first_name":"Emmanuel","middle_name":"","last_name":"Dupoux","name_suffix":"","institution":"Ecole Normale Sup ́erieure","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2017-01-01T13:00:00-05:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/27626/galley/17262/download/"}]}