The goal of the present paper is to study interference between French and English prosody. In order to study the influence of the prosody on the second language pronunciation, F0 slopes and vowel durations of the last syllables of prosodic groups were measured and analyzed in the pronunciation of French native speakers speaking French and English, and of English native speakers speaking English...

Observing that most variations in pronunciation are strongly speaker and speaking style dependent, and that the introduction of pronunciation variants in a speaker-independent recognition system is of limited success, we refrain from applying multiple pronunciation variants in the speakerindependent case and instead introduce pronunciation variants without supervision when specializing the reco...

In this study we compare the consonantal production of L4 learners (level A1+B2) with the expected canonical pronunciation and the pronunciation of a German L1 control group. The L4 speakers’ source languages are Hong Kong Cantonese (HKC) L1, Hong Kong English (HKE) L2 and Putonghua/Mandarin (P) L3. Due to major disparities across the typologically distant language pair Cantonese and German, an...

Kurzfassung: Learners with different native language backgrounds often show problems in the acquisition of German vowels caused by interferences of the phonological vowel system of the native language with the complex German vowel system. German not only distinguishes between tense and lax vowels but also between short and long vowels. The aim of the vowel trainer is to help learners of German ...

The Speech Mapping concept posits that speech sequences can be represented by trajectories in a multiparametric space, whose elements are related to each other by relationships representing speech production mechanisms. This concept is viewed as a useful framework for pronunciation training, in a scheme where the teacher uses a Virtual Talking Head, to manipulate audio-visual speech stimuli in ...

In the present contribution we start with an overview of the linguistic situation of Luxembourg. We then describe specificities of spoken and written Lëtzebuergesch, with respect to automatic speech processing. Multilingual code-switching and code-mixing, poor writing standardization as compared to languages such as English or French, a large diversity of spoken varieties, together with a limit...

Pronunciation dictionaries are the interface between orthographic and phonetic representation of the speech signal and are thereby a substantial component of speech recognition systems. In many systems simple canonical pronunciation forms are used within the dictionary. They represent the “correct” pronunciation as they are found in lexicons and neither contain the most frequent pronunciation n...

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 study we investigate the idea to automatically evaluate newly created pronunciation encodings for being correct or containing a potential error. Using a cascaded triphone detector and phonotactical n-gram modeling with an optimal Bayesian threshold we classify unknown pronunciation transcripts into the classes ’probably faulty’ or ’probably correct’. Transcripts tagged ’probably faulty’...