Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!ucsd!cogsci!norman
From: norman@cogsci.ucsd.EDU (Donald A Norman-UCSD Cog Sci Dept)
Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng
Subject: Re: Sorry, no PDP (or any other) speech recognition yet
Keywords: dipthong
Message-ID: <682@cogsci.ucsd.EDU>
Date: 6 Jan 89 16:28:22 GMT
References: <18726@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <2934@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <84021@sun.uucp>
Reply-To: norman@cogsci.UUCP (Donald A Norman-UCSD Cog Sci Dept)
Organization: UC San Diego Department of Cognitive Science
Lines: 24

(I have limited this reply to comp.cog-eng, because this is where it belongs.)

I am amused that the linguistic folks are arguing about my example
(the spoken phrase "new display" getting confused with "nudist play"),
trying to show there are really distinctions between the two words.

Doesn't anyone pay attention to data anymore, or is it all armchair theory?

The confusion really occurred: I once said (Note the context:
	I was just in Las Vegas and saw a large number of new
	displays.
(I had been at a computer show in Las Vegas -- I made the utterance in
San Diego).  Sure the context biased the interpretation, but the pont
of the example was to show that speech recognition is a difficult
business, and analysis of the waveform is not enough.

Theory may claim the words are different, but data say can be very confusable.

don norman

Donald A. Norman	[ danorman@ucsd.edu   BITNET: danorman@ucsd ]
Department of Cognitive Science C-015
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, California 92093 USA