This research investigated whether acoustic-phonetic knowledge of the mother tongue of a non-native speaker can be used to adapt an existing target language phoneme HMM recognizer. For this purpose three sets of phoneme HMMs were generated, one representing the target language (German), one the mother tongue of the non-native speaker (Turkish), and the third the foreign-accented pronunciation o...

It is generally accepted that non-mother-tongue speakers acquiring Xhosa often encounter difficulties with the acquisition of clicks. This paper addresses this issue by focussing on some of the results obtained from 18 Englishand Afrikaans-speaking children aged between 10;0 and 13;0, acquiring Xhosa as a third language in the primary school. The results firstly indicate that non-mother-tongue ...

Although 1.4 million people speak Northern Khmer in Thailand, they are aware that their language is still in decline. To deal with this threat, native speakers have cooperated with linguists from Mahidol University to work on a community-based research project since 2007. Teaching the Northern Khmer language as a subject in the formal school system was the first project which started at Ban Pho...

Considering that the pronunciation of second language speech is usually influenced by the mother tongue, we previously proposed using a reduced phoneme set for second language when the mother tongue of speakers is known. However, the proficiency of second language speakers varies widely, as does the influence of mother tongue on their pronunciation. Consequently, the optimal phoneme set is depe...