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...

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a more effective way for improving Korean students’ pronunciation relating to the phonological role in English pronunciation instruction. Three different aspects of pronunciation will be considered: general, syllabic, prosodic aspects relating to the two language differences, as well as the teaching of pronunciation in the classroom. In addition to th...

The pronunciation variations, which badly influenced the performance of ASR system, are serious in continuous speech, especially in spontaneous speech. Many research works are focused on pronunciation variation modeling in recent years. A framework for Chinese pronunciation variation modeling is described in this paper. The main idea is that the pronunciation variations are hidden in the recogn...

In this paper, we propose a Transformation-Based Learning (TBL) method on generating the Korean standard pronunciation. Previous studies on the phonological processing have been focused on the phonological rule applications and the finite state automata (Johnson 1984; Kaplan and Kay 1994; Koskenniemi 1983; Bird 1995). In case of Korean computational phonology, some former researches have approa...

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...

Acoustic representation of speech provided by phonetics, spectrogram, is noisy representation in that it shows every acoustic aspect of speech. Age, gender, shape, microphone, room, line, etc. are completely irrelevant to the pronunciation assessment. However, the spectrogram is affected inevitably by these factors. Recently, a novel acoustic representation of speech was proposed, where dimensi...

In this paper, a bi-lingual large vocaburary speech recognition experiment based on the idea of modeling pronunciation variations is described. The two languages under study are Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese (Min-nan). These two languages are basically mutually unintelligible, and they have many words with the same Chinese characters and the same meanings, although they are pronounced differen...

Pronunciation, long on the periphery of applied linguistics research and pedagogy, continues to grow in importance because of its central roles in speech recognition, speech perception, and speaker identity. Pronunciation-related issues such as comprehensibility, accent, and the mutual intelligibility of varieties of world Englishes are central to many questions in applied linguistics. This cal...

Focus of this work are pattern recognition related aspects of computer assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) for second language learning. An overview of commercial systems shows that pronunciation training is being addressed by the growing eld of computer assisted language learning only to a small extend, although in the state-of-the-art section a number of such approaches for automatic asses...