Van Heerden, C.J.Barnard, E.2008-08-272008-08-272008-06Van Heerden, CJ & Barnard, E 2008, 'Speaker-specific variability of phoneme durations', South African Computer Journal, no.40, pp.44-50. [http://www.journals.co.za/ej/ejour_comp.html]1015-7999http://hdl.handle.net/2263/6751The durations of phonemes varies for different speakers. To this end, the correlations between phonemes across different speakers are studied and a novel approach to predict unknown phoneme durations from the values of known phoneme durations for a particular speaker are presented, based on the maximum likelihood criterion. Several interesting patterns are observed. Phonemes from the same broad phonetic class tend to covary most strongly (and therefore intra-class predictions of unknown phoneme durations are most accurate), but significant cross-class correlations are also present. Consequently, knowledge of only a few highly-correlated phonemes’ durations is necessary to make a good duration prediction.295205 bytesapplication/pdfenComputer Society of South AfricaPhoneme durationsSpeech recognitionMaximum likelihoodEigenvectorsPhonemicsAutomatic speech recognitionArticle