Mispronunciation is still among the frailties of language learners the world over. The present study reports an all-out investigation into pronunciation training for the Persian-speaking EFL learners at the intermediate level of language proficiency. More specifically, the present study investigated (a) the underlying causes of mispronunciation at the level of segmental features, (b) the crucia...

This study investigates prosodic patterns in dialects of Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and Leeds that distinguish northern English pronunciation from other regional types. The authors argue melodic cues can act as signifiers cultural identity. empirical research included auditory acoustic analyses authentic speech recordings four female male speakers the listed above urban centres England. p...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of CALL/Web-based instruction on improving EFL learners’ pronunciation ability. To this end, 85 students who were enrolled in a language institute in Rasht were selected as subjects. These students were given the Oxford Placement Test in order to validate their proficiency levels. They were then divided into two groups of 30 and were...

This study focuses on word pronunciation in Text-to-Speech systems for Swedish. The purpose is to investigate whether machine learning techniques match knowledge-based systems in Swedish word pronunciation. The experiments show a maximum grapheme accuracy of just over 97%, and word accuracies from 67.0% for word pronunciation excluding stress assignment, which compares favourably to existing kn...

We propose a method for modeling pronunciation variation in the context of spell checking for non-native writers of English. Spell checkers, typically developed for native speakers, fail to address many of the types of spelling errors peculiar to non-native speakers, especially those errors influenced by differences in phonology. Our model of pronunciation variation is used to extend a pronounc...

Recent research has shown that a properly designed ASRbased CALL system (Dutch-CAPT) was capable of detecting pronunciation errors and of providing comprehensible feedback on pronunciation. Since pronunciation is not the only skill required for speaking a second language, we explored the possibility of extending the Dutch-CAPT approach to other aspects of speaking proficiency like morphology an...

Mispronunciation is still among the frailties of language learners the world over. The present study reports an all-out investigation into pronunciation training for the Persian-speaking EFL learners at the intermediate level of language proficiency. More specifically, the present study investigated (a) the underlying causes of mispronunciation at the level of segmental features, (b) the crucia...