In this paper, we report automatic pronunciation assessment experiments at phone-level on a read speech corpus in French, collected from 23 Japanese speakers learning French as a foreign language. We compare the standard approach based on Goodness Of Pronunciation (GOP) scores and phone-specific score thresholds to the use of logistic regressions (LR) models. French native speech corpus, in whi...

A significant source of errors in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems is due to pronunciation variations which occur in spontaneous and conversational speech. Usually ASR systems use a finite lexicon that provides one or more pronunciations for each word. In this paper, we focus on learning a similarity function between two pronunciations. The pronunciation can be the canonical and the s...

This paper presents an error prevention approach in the development of a Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training System (CAPT System) for teaching American English pronunciation to adult Mexican Spanish speakers developed for the case of vowels. Prior knowledge of the learner’s typical articulatory and auditory perception errors enhances the effectiveness of training. It enables to organize th...

We introduce the problem of learning pronunciations of out-ofvocabulary words from word recognition mistakes made by an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. This question is especially relevant in cases where the ASR engine is a black box – meaning that the only acoustic cues about the speech data come from the word recognition outputs. This paper presents an expectation maximization appr...

Pronunciation of English language is a very important sub-skill of speaking module in second language learning process. However, it is ignored, neglected, and even never gotten least attention by the teachers, administrators, and stakeholders especially in Pakistan. Grammar, vocabulary, and the other linguistic skills such as reading and writing are emphasized whereas pronunciation has never be...

Various studies have confirmed the influential role of corrective feedback (CF) in the development of different linguistic skills and components. However, little, if any, research has been conducted on comparing types of linguistic errors treated by teachers through CF. To bridge this gap, this study sought to investigate the linguistic errors addressed and the types of CF provided by teachers....

In this paper, we propose a system that automatically generates templates for detecting Chinese character errors. We first collect the confusion sets for each high-frequency Chinese character. Error types include pronunciation-related errors and radical-related errors. With the help of the confusion sets, our system generates possible error patterns in context, which will be used as detection t...

This research applies dialectometric methods to purely syntactic dialect data. It will be shown that there is geographic cohesion in syntactic variation when viewed in the aggregate. The amount of syntactic variation which can be accounted for by geography will be determined. Dialectometric techniques will be used to develop an additive measure of syntactic differences. Multidimensional scaling...

The relative importance of meaning (semantic context) and spaces between words during reading was investigated. Sub jects read paragraphs of coherent or incoherent text aloud; some paragraphs were presented normally, others with spaces between words removed. Coherent paragraphs were taken from a short story. Incoherent paragraphs had the same words and punctuation as the coherent paragraphs, bu...