Tonal errors pose a serious problem to Mandarin Chinese learners, making them stumble in their communication. The purpose of this paper is to investigate beginner level Japanese students’ difficulties in the perception and pronunciation of disyllabic words, particularly to find out which combinations of tones these errors mostly occur in. As a result, the errors made by the 10 subjects were mos...

In the 1990s, several studies showed that if we could just predict correctly when to include alternate pronunciations of words in ASR lexica, we could greatly reduce error rates for conversational speech tasks (i.e., Switchboard). But it is clear that the field has thus far failed to reach that potential. Many scholars model pronunciation variation via a substitution of one phonetic sequence fo...

2 Individual Pronunciation Coaching The difficulties experienced while learning the pronunciation of a second language do not only depend on the mother tongue of the learners but also on individual differences between learners. Even students of the same mother tongue and with a very similar learning background show huge differences in their individual pronunciation. Learners also differ in term...

as oral skills are increasingly seen as a high priority, phonology and pronuncia tion teaching are occupying a central position in the teaching and learning of other languages. the present study is an attempt to shed some light on identifying and exploring the diffculties of iranian efl learners in phonology and pronunciation. to achieve this goal, 3 male language learners (elementary, intermed...

Acquiring another language is a fairly challenging process. Pronunciation one of the components which embodies source concern for many learners. The reason behind this that English has difficult sounds non-native speakers. As an learner, improving pronunciation can help not only in making natural sentences, but also speech clear and understandable. This work trying to shed light on process acqu...

The usefulness of teaching pronunciation in language instruction remains controversial. Though past research suggests that teachers can make little or no difference in improving their students’ pronunciation,  current  findings  suggest  that  second  language  pronunciation  can  improve  to  be near  native-like  with  the  implementation  of  certain  criteria  such  as  the  utilization  of...

computer-assisted language learning (call) is reaching an up most position in the pedagogical field of english as a second or foreign language (esl/efl). the present study was carried out to study the effect of using phonetic websites on iranian efl students’ pronunciation and knowledge of phonemic symbols. participants of the study included 30 efl female pre-intermediate students studying in k...

This paper presents an approach to automatically extract and evaluate the “stability” of pronunciation variants (i.e., adequacy of the model to accommodate this variability), based on multiple pronunciations of each lexicon words and the knowledge of a reference baseform pronunciation. Most approaches toward modelling pronunciation variability in speech recognition are based on the inference (t...

The paper presents the algorithm of developing speech components aimed to be implemented into educational systems with elements of acoustic feedback. Such systems are demanded in the domain of distant education as far as foreign language teaching and pronunciation training is concerned. The need of such systems is evident because human teacher is not always at hand when the student needs phonet...

In this paper we describe a preliminary, work-in-progress Spoken Language Understanding Software (SLUS) with tailored feedback options, which uses interactive spoken language interface to teach Iraqi Arabic and culture to second language learners. The SLUS analyzes input speech by the second language learner and grades for correct pronunciation in terms of supra-segmental and rudimentary segmen...