This paper describes two experiments aimed at exploring the relationship between objective properties of speech and perceived pronunciation quality in read and spontaneous speech, with a view to determining whether such quantitative measures can be used to develop objective pronunciation tests. Read and spontaneous speech of two groups of 60 learners of Dutch as a second language was scored for...

In this study we develop pronunciation distances based on naive discriminative learning (NDL). Measures of pronunciation distance are used in several subfields of linguistics, including psycholinguistics, dialectology and typology. In contrast to the commonly used Levenshtein algorithm, NDL is grounded in cognitive theory of competitive reinforcement learning and is able to generate asymmetrica...

Pronunciation teaching methods, as a part of computer assisted language learning systems, are currently limited in their ability to produce feedback on pronunciation quality. After an overview of previous work on pronunciation teaching , this article presents a pronunciation scoring algorithm based on automatic speech recognition, whereby scores at a phonemic level can be calculated. These \goo...

Generating correct pronunciation of proper names remains one of the most difficult tasks in text-to-phoneme transcription. Although phonetic rules can be efficient in processing proper names of one language, foreign family names cannot be always correctly generated without additional pronunciation rules. The present study addresses the problem of pronunciation variants for French and foreign fa...

In this paper, we propose a procedure for training a pronunciation network with criteria consistent with the optimality objectives for speech recognition systems. In particular, we describe a framework for using maximum likelihood(ML) and minimum classi cation error(MCE) criteria for pronunciation network optimization. The ML criterion is used to obtain an optimal structure for the pronunciatio...

This paper describes how the performance of a continuous speech recognizer for Dutch has been improved by modeling pronunciation variation. We used three methods in order to model pronunciation variation. First, withinword variation was dealt with. Phonological rules were applied to the words in the lexicon, thus automatically generating pronunciation variants. Secondly, cross-word pronunciatio...

This paper describes two experiments aimed at exploring the relationship between objective properties of speech and perceived pronunciation quality in read and spontaneous speech, with a view to determining whether such quantitative measures can be used to develop objective pronunciation tests. Read and spontaneous speech of two groups of 60 learners of Dutch as a second language was scored for...

In this paper, we address the importance of pronunciation and acoustic model adaptation in multilingual speech recognition. When aiming at modeling several languages simultaneously, the degree of speaker and language variability is even greater than when concentrating on only one language. To compensate the pronunciation variability across various speaker, bi-lingual pronunciation modeling is p...

This paper investigates the features that determine the sentence pronunciation difficulty for Korean speakers of English. We selected three types of features: length, word frequency, and phonemes that Korean speakers generally replace with other phonemes. We used support vector machines and a multiple linear regression model to determine the pronunciation difficulty of given sentences, and meas...

Introducing pronunciation models into decoding has been proven to be benefit to LVCSR. In this paper, a discriminative pronunciation modeling method is presented, within the framework of the Minimum Phone Error (MPE) training for HMM/GMM. In order to bring the pronunciation models into the MPE training, the auxiliary function is rewritten at word level and decomposes into two parts. One is for ...