Goal: The goal of the proposed research project is to explore the use of syllable-based acoustical information in speech recognition.

Motivation: For at least a decade now the triphone model has been the dominant method of modeling speech acoustics. But triphones are relatively inefficient decompositional models, and they have become ponderous and resistant to integration of new information such as temporal characteristics and dependencies. The resulting tension between the desire to add model detail and the burden of doing so has caused researchers to look for alternatives to the triphone model. The syllable is one such alternative, appealing because of its close connection to articulation, its integration of coarticulation, and the possibility for relatively compact statistical coverage.