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...

Pronunciation of proper names that have different and varied language sources is an extremely hard task, even for humans. This thesis presents an attempt to improve automatic pronunciation of proper names by modeling the way humans do it, and tries to eliminate synthesis errors that humans would never make. It does so by taking into account the different language and language family sources and...

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...

In order to help understand why gains in pronunciation modeling have proven so elusive, we investigated which kinds of pronunciation variation are well captured by triphone models, and which are not. We do this by examining the change in behavior of a recognizer as it receives further triphone training. We show that many of the kinds of variation which previous pronunciation models attempt to c...

Articulatory information can support learning or remediating pronunciation of a second language (L2). This paper describes an electromagnetic articulometer-based visual-feedback approach using an articulatory target presented in real-time to facilitate L2 pronunciation learning. This approach trains learners to adjust articulatory positions to match targets for a L2 vowel estimated from product...

This paper reports on the early stages of a locally funded research and development project taking place at Rennes 2 university. It aims at developing a comprehensive pedagogical framework for pronunciation training for adult learners of English. This framework will combine a direct approach to pronunciation training (face-to-face teaching) with online instruction using and adapting existing Au...

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...

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...

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...

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...