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 assessed perception of suprasegmental features of speech by 30 prelingual children with sensorineural hearing loss. Ten children had cochlear implants (CIs), and 20 children wore hearing aids (HA): 10 with severe hearing loss and 10 with profound hearing loss. Perception of intonation, syllable stress, word emphasis, and word pattern was assessed. Results revealed that the two HA gro...

The goal of the work presented here is to automatically predict the type of an utterance in spoken dialogue by using automatically extracted suprasegmental information. For this task, we present and compare three stochastic algorithms: hidden Markov models, artificial neural nets, and classification and regression trees. These models are easily trainable, reasonably robust and fit into the prob...

Sonority is an important notion in phonology, but its definition has been controversial. Our analysis showed that sonority can be located in a multi-dimensional perceptual space, and that the dimensions of the space have correspondence to both acoustic parameters and phonological features. In the experiment, a confusion matrix was calculated from the results of consonant perception test for LPC...

This research seeks to establish an inventory of the suprasegmental acoustic cues that are relevant to the automatic typology and identification of the dialects of British English. Using evidence from traditional dialectology suggesting that the dialects of the British Isles exhibit differences at the suprasegmental level – and, in particular, in terms of rhythm – we apply procedures that have ...

Two proficient tracheoesophageal speakers experienced in use of the tracheostoma valve (TSV) produced a total of 64 examples of "Bev loves Bob." These productions varied with location of contrastive stress, type of sentence intonation, and use of TSV. Thirty-four listeners judged the utterances in terms of stress placement and intonation contour simultaneously. An analysis of variance of the pe...