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...

We describe a technique for learning pronunciation rules based on the Version Space algorithm. In particular, we describe how to learn pronunciation rules for a representative subset of the English graphemes. We present a learning procedure called LEP-G.1 (learning to pronounce English graphemes) that learns English pronunciation rules from examples in the form of word-pronunciation pairs. With...

In this paper, we propose a method for automatically generating a pronunciation dictionary based on a pronunciation neural network that can predict plausible pronunciations (alternative pronunciations) from the canonical pronunciation. This method can generate multiple forms of alternative pronunciations using the pronunciation network for words that only occur a few times in the database and e...

It is essential for Mandarin Proficiency Test that mandarin pronunciation is graded by computer system. But it still has a lot of problems need to be solved before it reaches the level of success. This paper proposes a novel method of objective grading pronunciation. The mandarin pronunciation can be decomposed into consonant, vowel and tone. In this paper the pronunciation feature parameters a...

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...

Beginning readers decode words through individual pronunciation of the sounds represented by each letter in succession. This method requires not only the mapping of speech sounds onto their graphic representations, but also the more basic knowledge that words have the potential to be broken up into their component sounds, a skill called phonological awareness. Competency in phonological awarene...

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...

In this study we develop pronunciation distances based on naive discriminative learning (NDL). Measures of pronunciation distance are used in several subfields of linguistics, including psycholinguistics, dialectology and typology. In contrast to the commonly used Levenshtein algorithm, NDL is grounded in cognitive theory of competitive reinforcement learning and is able to generate asymmetrica...

Pronunciation teaching methods, as a part of computer assisted language learning systems, are currently limited in their ability to produce feedback on pronunciation quality. After an overview of previous work on pronunciation teaching , this article presents a pronunciation scoring algorithm based on automatic speech recognition, whereby scores at a phonemic level can be calculated. These \goo...

Generating correct pronunciation of proper names remains one of the most difficult tasks in text-to-phoneme transcription. Although phonetic rules can be efficient in processing proper names of one language, foreign family names cannot be always correctly generated without additional pronunciation rules. The present study addresses the problem of pronunciation variants for French and foreign fa...