An inventory was compiled of pronunciation errors frequently made by foreigners speaking Dutch. On the basis of this inventory artificial errors were created in a native development corpus, which in turn were used to optimize thresholds for the Goodness of Pronunciation (GOP) algorithm. In the current study the GOP algorithm is evaluated in three different ways: (1) using a native test corpus w...

This article describes how the performance of a Dutch continuous speech recognizer was improved by modeling pronunciation variation. We propose a general procedure for modeling pronunciation variation. In short, it consists of adding pronunciation variants to the lexicon, retraining phone models and using language models to which the pronunciation variants have been added. First, within-word pr...

This article describes how the performance of a Dutch continuous speech recognizer was improved by modeling pronunciation variation. We propose a general procedure for modeling pronunciation variation. In short, it consists of adding pronunciation variants to the lexicon, retraining phone models and using language models to which the pronunciation variants have been added. First, within-word pr...

In this study, we examined the pronunciation characteristics of multiword expressions (MWEs). We first drew up an inventory of frequently occurring N-grams extracted from orthographic transcriptions of spontaneous speech contained in a large corpus of spoken Dutch. For about 10% of these Ngrams phonetic transcriptions were available, which were examined. Our results show that the pronunciation ...

An inventory was compiled of pronunciation errors frequently made by foreigners speaking Dutch. On the basis of this inventory artificial errors were created in a native development corpus, which in turn were used to optimize thresholds for the Goodness of Pronunciation (GOP) algorithm. In the current study the GOP algorithm is evaluated in three different ways: (1) using a native test corpus w...

An inventory was compiled of pronunciation errors frequently made by foreigners speaking Dutch. On the basis of this inventory artificial errors were created in a native development corpus, which in turn were used to optimize thresholds for the Goodness of Pronunciation (GOP) algorithm. In the current study the GOP algorithm is evaluated in three different ways: (1) using a native test corpus w...

To draw EFL teachers’ attention to pronunciation difficulties resulting from L1 phonotactic constraints, this study examined the hypothesis that certain syllable structures could cause more mispronunciation than segmental sounds for Mandarin-speaking EFL learners. A 145-word reading passage was developed with a total of 30 target sounds, which included the problematic syllable structures that e...

With the advancement of globalization, an increasing number people are learning and using a common language as tool for international communication. However, there clear distinctions between native target language, especially in pronunciation, domestic environment is far from ideal, with few competent teachers. In addition, such cannot achieve computer-assisted (CALL) technology. The efficient ...

The performance of automatic speech recognition systems varies widely across different contexts. Very good performance can be achieved on single-speaker, large-vocabulary dictation in a clean acoustic environment, as well as on very small vocabulary tasks with much fewer constraints on the speakers and acoustic conditions. In other domains, speech recognition is still far from usable for real-w...

The performance of automatic speech recognition systems varies widely across different contexts. Very good performance can be achieved on single-speaker, large-vocabulary dictation in a clean acoustic environment, as well as on very small vocabulary tasks with much fewer constraints on the speakers and acoustic conditions. In other domains, speech recognition is still far from usable for real-w...