In this study we present various techniques to evaluate the pronunciation of students of a foreign language without any knowledge of the uttered text. Previous attempts have shown that it is feasible to evaluate the pronunciation of a non-native speaker by having implicit or explicit knowledge of the uttered text, provided that enough utterances are available. Our approach is to use characteris...

A model of pronunciation of words in discourse context has been induced from the annotation of a spoken language corpus. The information included in the annotation is a set of variables hypothesised to be important for the pronunciation of words in discourse context. The annotation is connected to segmentally defined units on tiers corresponding to linguistically relevant units: the discourse, ...

Objective pronunciation assessment plays a very important role in the Mandarin Proficiency Test. But it still has a long way to go before it reaches the level of success. In this paper, the novel Mandarin objective pronunciation assessment pronunciation of is proposed. The standard of Mandarin pronunciation is divided into six levels. The mandarin pronunciation is divided into consonant, vowel ...

This paper presents an approach to automatically extract and evaluate the “stability” of pronunciation variants (i.e., adequacy of the model to accommodate this variability), based on multiple pronunciations of each lexicon words and the knowledge of a reference baseform pronunciation. Most approaches toward modelling pronunciation variability in speech recognition are based on the inference (t...

Over the last few years, the realm of foreign language learning has witnessed an abundance of research concerning the effectiveness of corrective feedback on the acquisition of grammatical features, with the study of other target language subsystems, such as pronunciation, being few and far between. In order to bridge this gap, the present study intended to investigate and compare the immediate...

This paper aims to present an analysis of English pronunciation variations using the TIMIT corpus of American English. The manually annotated data are analyzed by comparing the pronunciation variants to their canonical pronunciations which are defined by using the CMU Pronunciation Dictionary. Vowels and consonants are separately analyzed with respect to substitution, deletion and insertion. Th...

Computer-assisted language learning (CALL) is reaching an up most position in the pedagogical field of English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESL/EFL). The present study was carried out to study the effect of using phonetic websites on Iranian EFL students’ pronunciation and knowledge of phonemic symbols. Participants of the study included 30 EFL female pre-intermediate students studyin...