This paper proposes a formant-based approach for computer-assisted English vowel assessment. Various studies in formant-based speech synthesis have suggested the importance of formant coefficients; this motivates us to investigate pronunciation assessment using formant information instead of MFCC (Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients) alone. In particular, we explore the multistream HMM with the...

Modeling pronunciation variation in spontaneous speech is very important for improving the recognition accuracy. One limitation of current recognition systems is their dictionaries for recognition only contain one standard pronunciation for each entry, so that the amount of variability that can be modeled is very limited. In this paper, we proposed to generate pronunciation networks based on ru...

It is widely acknowledged that pronunciation modeling is an efficient way to improve recognition performance in spontaneous speech. In pronunciation modeling, almost all methods of generating variation probability are based on relative frequency counting from DP alignment. In this paper, we investigate the local model mismatching caused by pronunciation variations and propose to estimate variat...

Although Persian and English share many common phonemes, there are some phonological features that are present in English but absent in Persian which tend to lead to mispronunciation on the part of Persian learners of English, mostly through negative transfer. The present research assesses the efficacy of a communicative framework in improving Iranian adult EFL learners’ pronunciation of five E...

This study investigated teachers’ views toward computer technology in teaching English pronunciation. In order to select teachers for the semi-structured interview, the researcher used a questionnaire and distributed it to 25 teachers from two Islamic Azad Universities of Guilan, Iran. The researcher chose 15 of them based on their answers to the questionnaire. Then a qualitative method d...

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...

Conversational speech exhibits considerable pronunciation variability, which has been shown to have a detrimental effect on the accuracy of automatic speech recognition. There have been many attempts to model pronunciation variation, including the use of decision trees to generate alternate word pronunciations from phonemic baseforms. Use of pronunciation models during recognition is known to i...

The aim of the current study was to investigate whether L2 minimal pairs practice would have an effect on Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ pronunciation accuracy. For this purpose, 30 Iranian intermediate EFL learners at Simin institute participated in the experiment of the study. The selection of subjects was done from among 150 EFL learners at intermediate level. In order to make subj...

a proficiency test is one of the language tests with the goal of assessing/evaluating the language learners' achievement. this test does not deal with language teaching and learning methods. in fact, in a proficiency test, we concentrate on determining the level of the testee’s ability in applying language at the time of administrating the test and for the test taker, it is not important t...

The numbers of Somali immigrants in Sweden has increased during the last years and there is a need of more competence for teaching Swedish as a second language to this group.Star This paper investigates aspects of difficulties in the pronunciation of Swedish for Somali speakers. Recordings of two Somali speakers living in Sweden have been analyzed and it is obvious that there are pronunciation ...