Phonetic Information

Phonetic information, the acoustic and articulatory properties of speech sounds, is a central focus in speech technology and language acquisition research. Current research emphasizes understanding how phonetic information is represented in high-dimensional spaces generated by self-supervised learning models, often using techniques like principal component analysis and novel metrics to assess orthogonality and isotropy of phonetic and speaker subspaces. This work aims to improve speech recognition, speaker verification, and cross-lingual applications by leveraging these representations, as well as informing our understanding of how phonetic features are learned and processed by both humans and machines. The resulting advancements have significant implications for improving speech technologies for low-resource languages and for clinical applications such as diagnosing neurological disorders through speech analysis.