This paper investigates the features that determine the sentence pronunciation difficulty for Korean speakers of English. We selected three types of features: length, word frequency, and phonemes that Korean speakers generally replace with other phonemes. We used support vector machines and a multiple linear regression model to determine the pronunciation difficulty of given sentences, and meas...

Motivated by a desire to assess speaking and reading skills and perform unsupervised tutoring of non-native speakers in a foreign language, robust evaluation of speech variability and pronunciation quality must incorporate perceptually meaningful information from many domains of speech analysis – spectral and prosodic, segmental and suprasegmental, and so on. In this paper we present three tech...

A parallel distributed processing model of visual word recognition and pronunciation is described. The model consists of sets of orthographic and phonological units and an interlevel of hidden units. Weights on connections between units were modified during a training phase using the back-propagation learning algorithm. The model simulates many aspects of human performance, including (a) differ...

The goal of producing a corpus-based synthesizer with the owner’s voice can only be achieved if the system can handle recordings with less than ideal characteristics. One of the limitations is that a normal speaker does not always pronounce a word exactly as predicted by the language rules. In this work we compare two methods for handling variations on word pronunciation for corpus-based speech...

Learners often struggle with L2 sounds, yet little is known about the role of prior pronunciation knowledge and explicit articulatory training in language acquisition. This study asks if existing pronunciation knowledge can bootstrap word learning, and whether short-term audiovisual articulatory training for tongue position with and without a production component has an effect on lexical retent...

The aim of this contribution is twofold: evaluating the use of pronunciation variants in read and spontaneous speech and studying the link between word frequencies and pronunciation variants. The dependance of pronunciation variants on a given system connguration is also addressed in the rst part. For the second aspect of this work diierent variant types are deened. A cross-lingual study is car...

The goal of producing a corpus-based synthesizer with the owner’s voice can only be achieved if the system can handle recordings with less than ideal characteristics. One of the limitations is that a normal speaker does not always pronounce a word exactly as predicted by the language rules. In this work we compare two methods for handling variations on word pronunciation for corpus-based speech...

This paper addresses the problem of generating lexical word representations that properly represent natural pronunciation variations for the purpose of improved speech recognition accuracy. The current work is based on a procedure for data-driven optimisation of the pronunciation dictionary which creates a single baseform per word in the vocabulary, subject to a maximumlike-lihood (ML) criterio...

In this paper, we develop a new method for compiling a pronunciation dictionary to model pronunciation variation in spontaneous speech recognition. The pronunciation dictionary is assembled by iteratively selecting pronunciations from a datadriven word confusion table, based on directly maximizing the word correct rate simulated by a production-recognition model such that the optimal performanc...

Although the success of automatic speech recognition (ASR)-based Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) systems is increasing, little is known about the pedagogical effectiveness of these systems. This is particularly regrettable because ASR technology still suffers from limitations that may result in the provision of erroneous feedback, possibly leading to learning breakdowns. To stud...