摘要：Forced alignment is a speech signal recognition technique where the onset and offset of speech sounds areidentified based on a known sequence of phonemes. Although manual acoustic-phonetic segmentation is considereda more accurate method, it could be very time-consuming; especially when transcribing a large-scale speech corpus.Hence, forced alignment has become a tool for doing the task automatically. It would be extremely useful if thetechnique could be applied to the study of communication disorders; however, its accuracy in the case of productionerrors (e.g., literal paraphasias in aphasia) has not been investigated. Moreover, whether manual adjustment of thephonetic segmentation will be needed and to what extent it will be needed are unknown. Therefore, this study wasconducted to answer these questions. The findings are important for a larger project, currently undertaken by theauthors, that aims to build a language database of 180 individuals with aphasia and 180 typical speakers ofCantonese, and to conduct an acoustic analysis of prosody at the discourse level, as one of the data analyses.
