The high error rate in spontaneous speech recognition is due in part to the poor modeling of pronunciation variations. An analysis of acoustic data reveals that pronunciation variations include both complete changes and partial changes. Complete changes are the replacement of a canonical phoneme by another alternative phone, such as b being pronounced as p . Partial changes are the variations w...

In this study, we investigate which factors influence the linguistic distance of Catalan dialectal pronunciations from standard Catalan. We use pronunciations from three regions where the northwestern variety of the Catalan language is spoken (Catalonia, Aragon and Andorra). In contrast to Aragon, Catalan has an official status in both Catalonia and Andorra, which likely influences standardizat...

In this paper, we describe a pronunciation lexicon model which is especially useful for constructing morpheme-based pronunciation lexicon to improve the performance of a Korean LVCSR. There are a lot of pronunciation variations occurring at morpheme boundaries in continuous speech. For modeling of cross-morpheme pronunciation variations, we usually used a context-dependent multiple pronunciatio...

The ultimate aim of the research reported on here is to develop an automatic testing system for Dutch pronunciation. In the experiment described in this paper automatic scores of telephone speech produced by native and non-native speakers of Dutch are compared with speci®c, i.e., temporal and segmental, and global pronunciation ratings assigned by three groups of experts: three phoneticians and...

PLASER is a multimedia tool with instant feedback designed to teach English pronunciation for high-school students of Hong Kong whose mother tongue is Cantonese Chinese. The objective is to teach correct pronunciation and not to assess a student’s overall pronunciation quality. Major challenges related to speech recognition technology include: allowance for non-native accent, reliable and corre...

Acoustic representation of speech provided by phonetics, spectrogram, is noisy representation in that it shows every acoustic aspect of speech. Age, gender, shape, microphone, room, line, etc. are completely irrelevant to the pronunciation assessment. However, the spectrogram is affected inevitably by these factors. Recently, a novel acoustic representation of speech was proposed, where dimensi...

Traditional dialect maps are based on data from carefully selected informants which usually results in clear-cut dialect borders, isoglosses, with one dialect characteristic present on one side of the isogloss and absent on the other. We illustrate some of the problems and pitfalls connected with using dialect maps for ASR by comparing results from traditional dialect research with investigatio...

Pronunciation, long on the periphery of applied linguistics research and pedagogy, continues to grow in importance because of its central roles in speech recognition, speech perception, and speaker identity. Pronunciation-related issues such as comprehensibility, accent, and the mutual intelligibility of varieties of world Englishes are central to many questions in applied linguistics. This cal...

Pronunciation is essential to appropriate communication because the incorrect use ofpronunciation inevitably leads to the message being misunderstood by the receptor. In spite of itsimportance, L2 learners often regard pronunciation as the most difficult language skill to learn.In this study, shadowing as an act or task in pronunciation, in which the learner tracks the targetspeech and repeats ...