Words and pronunciation as coding aids

Phonetic variation and the recognition of words with pronunciation variants

Studies on the effects of pronunciation variants on spoken word recognition have seemingly contradictory results – some find support for a lexical representation that contains a frequent variant, others, an infrequent (but idealized) variant. We argue that this paradox is resolved by appealing to the phonetics of the overall word. In two phoneme categorization studies, we examined the categoriz...

Empathy as a Predictor of Pronunciation Mastery: The Case of Female Iranian EFL Learners’ Pronunciation Errors

The present study set out to identify the problematic areas of pronunciation among Iranian female EFL learners. Further, this study investigated the relationship between empathy and authentic pronunciation, along with gender as a moderator variable. Comparing segmental features and phonological processes of both languages helped teachers to predict the target errors. To reach such a goa...

Modeling Pronunciation of OOV Words for Speech Recognition

This paper presents a technique for modeling pronunciation in automatic speech recognition using an approach based on statistical machine translation. The task of a pronunciation model in speech recognition is to convert a sequence of phonemes into proper words of the language. This task can be realized as a machine translation approach, whereby the source language is a sequence of phonemes and...

Partial Words for DNA Coding

Computer Assisted Pronunciation Teaching (CAPT) and Pedagogy: Improving EFL learners’ Pronunciation Using Clear Pronunciation 2 Software

This study examined the impact of Clear Pronunciation 2 software on teaching English suprasegmental features, focusing on stress, rhythm and intonation. In particular, the software covers five topics in relation to suprasegmental features including consonant cluster, word stress, connected speech, sentence stress and intonation. Seven Iranian EFL learners participated in this study. The study l...