Productions in a foreign language (L2) are commonly affected by segmental and suprasegmental features of the phonetic/phonological system of the mother tongue (L1). As for the segmental level, the sounds of the L2, which are close or similar to others of the L1, are deeply influenced by the native system; these influences are perceived as foreign accent but could also be acceptable from the poi...

L2 speech is often characterized by deviations from standard pronunciation leading native speakers to rate non native speakers as foreigners and to develop discriminatory attitudes against them [1]. Foreign accent reduction would therefore facilitate communication in the modern multilingual societies. Several studies on L2 acquisition and on speech synthesis have emphasized the role of supraseg...

A statistical language model attempts to characterise the patterns present in a natural language as a probability distribution defined over word sequences. Typically, they are trained using word co-occurrence statistics from a large sample of text. In some language modelling applications, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), the availability of acoustic data provides an additional source...

From a discourse perspective, utterances may vary in at least two important respects: (i) they can occupy a different hierarchical position in a larger-scale information unit and (ii) they can represent different types of speech acts. Spoken language systems will improve if they adequately take into account both discourse segmentation and utterance purpose. An important question then is how suc...

Models of phonological development assume that speech perception precedes speech production and that children acquire suprasegmental features earlier than segmental features. Studies of Chinese-speaking children challenge these assumptions. For example, Chinese-speaking children can produce tones before two-and-a-half years but are not able to discriminate the same tones until after 6 years of ...

The present study examines the relative impact of segments and intonation on accentedness, comprehensibility, and intelligibility, specifically investigating the separate contribution of segmental and intonational information to perceived foreign accent in Korean-accented English. Two English speakers and two Korean speakers recorded 40 English sentences. The sentences were manipulated by combi...