Bridging automatic speech recognition and psycholinguistics: extending Shortlist to an end-to-end model of human speech recognition.

This letter evaluates potential benefits of combining human speech recognition (HSR) and automatic speech recognition by building a joint model of an automatic phone recognizer (APR) and a computational model of HSR, viz. Shortlist (Norris, 1994). Experiments based on 'real-life' speech highlight critical limitations posed by some of the simplifying assumptions made in models of human speech recognition. These limitations could be overcome by avoiding hard phone decisions at the output side of the APR, and by using a match between the input and the internal lexicon that flexibly copes with deviations from canonical phonemic representations.