It is well known that vowel duration may differ across languages. In foreign language learning these differences may lead to incorrectly produced durations in the target language, since the speaker will be inhibited by his mother tongue. In this paper two experirnents are reported. The fust describes a production test, airned at obtaining a systernatic description of durations of comparable vow...

The goal of the present paper is to study interference between French and English prosody. In order to study the influence of the prosody on the second language pronunciation, F0 slopes and vowel durations of the last syllables of prosodic groups were measured and analyzed in the pronunciation of French native speakers speaking French and English, and of English native speakers speaking English...

Bilingual parallel corpora are very important in various filed of natural language processing (NLP). The quality of a Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) system strongly dependent upon the amount of training data. For low resource language pairs such as Persian-English, there are not enough parallel sentences to build an accurate SMT system. This paper describes a new approach to use the Wiki...

This study investigated how vowel epenthesis, a typical suprasegmental error produced by Japanese learners of English, is realized in their speech production of L2 English. We investigated two aspects: (i) whether loanword epenthesis phonology in Japanese transfers to English speech production, and (ii) how learners’ English proficiency level affects vowel epenthesis. In Japanese loanword phono...

The goal of the present paper is to study interference between French and English prosody. In order to study the influence of the prosody on the second language pronunciation, F0 slopes and vowel durations of the last syllables of prosodic groups were measured and analyzed in the pronunciation of French native speakers speaking French and English, and of English native speakers speaking English...

This study investigated vowel length discrimination in infants from 2 language backgrounds, Japanese and English, in which vowel length is either phonemic or nonphonemic. Experiment 1 revealed that English 18-month-olds discriminate short and long vowels although vowel length is not phonemically contrastive in English. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that Japanese 18-month-olds also discriminate t...

This study investigated whether individuals with small and large native-language (L1) vowel inventories learn second-language (L2) vowel systems differently, in order to better understand how L1 categories interfere with new vowel learning. Listener groups whose L1 was Spanish (5 vowels) or German (18 vowels) were given five sessions of high-variability auditory training for English vowels, aft...

In this paper, we investigate the problem of Ezafe recognition in Persian language. Ezafe is an unstressed vowel that is usually not written, but is intelligently recognized and pronounced by human. Ezafe marker can be placed into noun phrases, adjective phrases and some prepositional phrases linking the head and modifiers. Ezafe recognition in Persian is indeed a homograph disambiguation probl...

We used an innovative technique to measure the trajectories of vowel nasality in three languages: English, Mandarin, and Portuguese. An SVM classifier was trained on MFCC parameters at five positions in nasal and oral vowels, and the “nasality trajectory” for each language was evaluated in terms of classification accuracy at each of the five positions. The results support the view that Portugue...