Mispronunciation is still among the frailties of language learners the world over. The present study reports an all-out investigation into pronunciation training for the Persian-speaking EFL learners at the intermediate level of language proficiency. More specifically, the present study investigated (a) the underlying causes of mispronunciation at the level of segmental features, (b) the crucia...

Generating pronunciation variants of words is an important subject in speech research and is used extensively in automatic speech recognition and segmentation systems. Decision trees are well known tools in modeling pronunciation over words or sub-word units. In the case of word units and very large vocabulary, in order to train necessary decision trees, a huge amount of speech utterances are r...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of CALL/Web-based instruction on improving EFL learners’ pronunciation ability. To this end, 85 students who were enrolled in a language institute in Rasht were selected as subjects. These students were given the Oxford Placement Test in order to validate their proficiency levels. They were then divided into two groups of 30 and were...

In the past decades, many successful approaches for language identification have been published. However, almost none of these approaches were developed with singing in mind. Singing has a lot of characteristics that differ from speech, such as a wider variance of fundamental frequencies and phoneme durations, vibrato, pronunciation differences, and different semantic content. We present a new ...

Mispronunciation is still among the frailties of language learners the world over. The present study reports an all-out investigation into pronunciation training for the Persian-speaking EFL learners at the intermediate level of language proficiency. More specifically, the present study investigated (a) the underlying causes of mispronunciation at the level of segmental features, (b) the crucia...

Although articulatory feature-based conditional pronunciation models (AFCPMs) can capture the pronunciation characteristics of speakers, they requires one discrete density function for each phoneme, which may lead to inaccurate models when the amount of training data is limited. This paper proposes a phonetic-class based AFCPM in which the density functions in speaker models are conditioned on ...

This paper presents a new technique in the development of tools for Computer-Aided Language Learning (CALL) in Second Language (L2) pronunciation training. Instead of the usual pinpointing and feedback strategies, which address all production errors in the L2 speaker equally, this technique aims at honing in on where a pronunciation error can lead to a confusion in the transmission of the messa...

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...