The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a more effective way for improving Korean students’ pronunciation relating to the phonological role in English pronunciation instruction. Three different aspects of pronunciation will be considered: general, syllabic, prosodic aspects relating to the two language differences, as well as the teaching of pronunciation in the classroom. In addition to th...

This paper describes two experiments aimed at exploring the relationship between objective properties of speech and perceived pronunciation quality in read and spontaneous speech, with a view to determining whether such quantitative measures can be used to develop objective pronunciation tests. Read and spontaneous speech of two groups of 60 learners of Dutch as a second language was scored for...

Speech corpora play an important role in phonetic research and have been applied in daily life. Their application can be found in pronunciation teaching and learning. This article takes Jianghuai mandarin, a transitional dialect between northern and southern dialects in China, as an example to illustrate the necessity and procedures about the construction of an English speech corpus of learners...

Speakers make effective adaptation to unfavourable articulatory conditions and they successfully compensate for the perturbation. The influence of artificial palate (6mm thick in the region of the alveolar ridge) on the reorganization of articulatory movements when speakers practise pronunciation with the artificial palate is investigated. Five female students of normal articulatory and hearing...

In this paper an algorithm and rst results from our investigations in automatically learning pronunciation variations from speech data are presented. Pronunciation dictionaries establish an important feature in state-of-the-art speech recognition systems. In most systems only simple dictionaries containing the canonical pronunciation forms are implemented. However, for a good recognition perfor...

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...

Pronunciation variation in conversational speech has caused significant amount of word errors in large vocabulary automatic speech recognition. Rule-based approaches and decision-tree based approaches have been previously proposed to model pronunciation variation. In this paper, we report our work on modeling pronunciation variation using artificial neural networks (ANN). The results we achieve...

Focus of this work are pattern recognition related aspects of computer assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) for second language learning. An overview of commercial systems shows that pronunciation training is being addressed by the growing eld of computer assisted language learning only to a small extend, although in the state-of-the-art section a number of such approaches for automatic asses...

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...

The state-of-the-art Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems lack the ability to identify spoken words if they have non-standard pronunciations. In this paper, we present a new classification algorithm to identify pronunciation variants. It uses Dynamic Phone Warping (DPW) technique to compute the pronunciation-by-pronunciation phonetic distance and a threshold critical distance criterion fo...