The visual perception of words is known to activate the auditory representation of their spoken forms automatically. We examined the neural mechanism for this phonological activation using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) with a masked priming paradigm. The stimulation sites (left superior temporal gyrus [L-STG] and inferior parietal lobe [L-IPL]), modality of targets (visual and auditor...

Modelling of pronunciation variability is an important part of the acoustic model of a speech recognition system. Good pronunciation models contribute to the robustness and portability of a speech recogniser. Usually pronunciation modelling is associated with the recognition lexicon which allows a direct control of HMM selection. However, in state-of-the-art systems the use of clustering techni...

Calculating posterior probability within a standard pronunciation space (SPS) is a common method in automatic pronunciation error detection (APED). However, to pronunciation errors outside the SPS, this kind of methods can only give an approximate solution, that may be not right in many applications. This paper expands the SPS to include more pronunciation errors, introduces a Bhattacharyya dis...

We describe an algorithm to learn word pronunciations from acoustic data. The algorithm jointly optimizes the pronunciation of a word using (a) the acoustic match of this pronunciation to the observed data, and (b) how “linguistically reasonable” the pronunciation is. Variations of word pronunciations in the recognition dictionary (which was created by linguists), are used to train a model of w...

This study investigates whether a computer assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) system can help young learners improve word-level pronunciation skills in English as a foreign language at a level comparable to that achieved through traditional teacher-led training. The pronunciation improvement of a group of learners of 11 years of age receiving teacher-fronted instruction was compared to that...

various aspects of pronunciation quality and with their The aim of the research reported on here is to develop a system for automatic assessment of foreign speakers’ pronunciation of Dutch. In this paper, special attention is paid to expert ratings of pronunciation, because they are used as a reference to validate the pronunciation scores obtained automatically. It is shown that the ratings can...

Due to the large variability of pronunciation in spontaneous speech, pronunciation modeling becomes a more challenging and essential part in speech recognition. In this paper, we describe two different approaches of pronunciation modeling by using decision tree. At lexical level, a pronunciation variation dictionary is built to obtain alternative pronunciations for each word, in which each entr...

This work is part of a project aimed at developing a speech recognition system for language instruction that can assess the quality of pronunciation, identify pronunciation problems, and provide the student with accurate feedback about specific mistakes. Previous work was mainly concerned with scoring the quality of pronunciation. In this work we focus on automatic detection of mispronunciation...

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...

In the frame of the Inco-Copernicus program of the European Commission titled „A Multimedia Multilingual Teaching and Training System for Speech Handicapped children” an audiovisual pronunciation teaching and training method and software system has been developed for hearing and speechhandicapped persons to help them to control their speech production. During a part of the training the interpre...