Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) has now established itself as a prolific area whose advantages are well-known to educators. Yet, many authors lament the lack of a reliable integrated conceptual framework linking technology advances and second language acquisition research within which effective materials can be designed [1],[2]. The CALL world has recently witnessed a flourishing of ...

This study investigated whether children can use partial information to learn the pronunciations of Chinese characters. Participants were 49 2nd graders and 56 4th graders whose home language was Mandarin and 75 2nd graders and 93 4th graders whose home language was Cantonese. Children had 2 trials to learn the Mandarin pronunciations of 28 unfamiliar compound characters of 4 types. Children le...

man Dorland, a.m., m.d. London and Philadelphia : W. B. Saunders & Company. Fifth Edition, revised and enlarged. This Pocket Dictionary is a reduced edition of Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary which we have noticed so favourably above. The pocket edition has many of the good points of the larger work, and gives clear, concise and accurate definitions of all words used in medicine, surge...

The large pronunciation variability of words in conversational speech is one of the major causes of low accuracy for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Many pronunciation modeling approaches have been developed to address this problem. Some explicitly manipulate the pronunciation dictionary as well as the set of the units used to define the pronunciations of words. Others model the pronunciati...

In this paper, three different approaches to pronunciation modeling are investigated. Two existing pronunciation modeling approaches, namely the pronunciation dictionary and n-best rescoring approach are modified to work with little amount of non-native speech. We also propose a speaker clustering approach, which capable of grouping the speakers based on their pronunciation habits. Given some s...

This study investigated teachers’ views toward computer technology in teaching English pronunciation. In order to select teachers for the semi-structured interview, the researcher used a questionnaire and distributed it to 25 teachers from two Islamic Azad Universities of Guilan, Iran. The researcher chose 15 of them based on their answers to the questionnaire. Then a qualitative method d...

This paper describes a software framework for HMM-based speech synthesis that we have developed and released to the public. The framework is compatible to the well-known HTS toolkit by incorporating hts engine and Flite. It enables HTS voices to be used as Microsoft Windows system voices and to be integrated into Android and iOS apps. Non-English languages are supported through the capability t...

relates to similar studies carried out elsewhere. The aim of the research reported on here is to develop a system 2. PREVIOUS STUDIES for automatic assessment of foreign speakers’ pronunciation of Dutch. In this paper similar studies carried out for English are 2.1. Automatic scoring of pronunciation quality first examined. Subsequently, suggestions are made for partly improving the methodology...

Accurate recognition of proper nouns is a critical component of automatic speech recognition (ASR). Since there are no obvious letter-to-sound conversion rules that govern the pronunciation of any large set of proper nouns, this is an open-ended problem that evolves constantly under various sociolinguistic influences. A Boltzmann machine neural network is well-suited for the task of generating ...

SRI International is currently involved in the development of a new generation of software systems for automatic scoring of pronunciation as part of the Voice Interactive Language Training System (VILTS) project. This paper describes the goals of the VILTS system, the speech corpus, and the algorithm development. The automatic grading system uses SRI’s DecipherTM continuous speech recognition s...