An inventory was compiled of pronunciation errors frequently made by foreigners speaking Dutch. On the basis of this inventory artificial errors were created in a native development corpus, which in turn were used to optimize thresholds for the Goodness of Pronunciation (GOP) algorithm. In the current study the GOP algorithm is evaluated in three different ways: (1) using a native test corpus w...

An inventory was compiled of pronunciation errors frequently made by foreigners speaking Dutch. On the basis of this inventory artificial errors were created in a native development corpus, which in turn were used to optimize thresholds for the Goodness of Pronunciation (GOP) algorithm. In the current study the GOP algorithm is evaluated in three different ways: (1) using a native test corpus w...

One of the biggest challenges in designing computer assisted language learning (CALL) applications that provide automatic feedback on pronunciation errors consists in reliably detecting the pronunciation errors at such a detailed level that the information provided can be useful to learners. In our research we investigate pronunciation errors frequently made by foreigners learning Dutch as a se...

In this study, a new algorithm for automatic accent evaluation of native and non-native speakers is presented. The proposed system consists of two main steps: alignment and scoring. At the alignment step, the speech utterance is processed using a Weighted Finite State Transducer (WFST) based technique to automatically estimate the pronunciation errors. Subsequently, in the scoring step a Maximu...

The present study set out to identify the problematic areas of pronunciation among Iranian female EFL learners. Further, this study investigated the relationship between empathy and authentic pronunciation, along with gender as a moderator variable. Comparing segmental features and phonological processes of both languages helped teachers to predict the target errors. To reach such a goa...

In the field of second language acquisition research the overall interest in pronunciation is relatively limited. Within the group of researchers that do take an interest in pronunciation, many adhere to the idea that prosodic errors are more detrimental to intelligibility of nonnative speakers than segmental errors. This view can be found in recent handbooks for foreign language teaching as we...

In this paper, we present an acoustic-phonetic approach to automatic pronunciation error detection. Classifiers using techniques such as Linear Discriminant Analysis or a decision tree were developed for three sounds that are frequently pronounced incorrectly by L2-learners of Dutch: /A/, /Y/ and /x/. The acoustic properties of these pronunciation errors were examined so as to define a number o...

This paper describes a speech-enabled Computer Aided Pronunciation Learning (CAPL) system HAFSS. This system was developed for teaching Arabic pronunciations to non-native speakers. A challenging application of HAFSS is teaching the correct recitation of the holy Qur'an. HAFSS uses a state of the art speech recognizer to detect errors in user recitation. To increase accuracy of the speech recog...