The use of suprasegmental cues to word stress occurs across many languages. Nevertheless, L1 English listeners' pay little attention and evidence shows that segmental are more important listeners in how words identified speech. assume strong syllables with full vowels mark the beginning a new word, attempting alternative resegmentations only when this heuristic fails identify viable string. err...

Some studies on training effects of pronunciation instruction have claimed that the prosodic features has at segmental level and level, with greater reported when prosody is main focus training. This paper revisits this claim by looking Italian learners German. In a pre-post-test design, we investigate acoustic changes after in learners’ productions two regarded as segmental. The were pitch exc...

In the field of second language acquisition research the overall interest in pronunciation is relatively limited. Within the group of researchers that do take an interest in pronunciation, many adhere to the idea that prosodic errors are more detrimental to intelligibility of nonnative speakers than segmental errors. This view can be found in recent handbooks for foreign language teaching as we...

In light of the fact that L2 pronunciation errors are often caused by the transfer of well-established L1 sound systems, this paper examines some of the characteristic phonological differences between Japanese and English. Comparing segmental and suprasegmental aspects of both languages, this study also discusses several problematic areas of pronunciation for Japanese learners of English. Based...

PLASER is a multimedia tool with instant feedback designed to teach English pronunciation for high-school students of Hong Kong whose mother tongue is Cantonese Chinese. The objective is to teach correct pronunciation and not to assess a student’s overall pronunciation quality. Major challenges related to speech recognition technology include: allowance for non-native accent, reliable and corre...

In this paper we report on a study that was carried out to obtain an inventory of segmental errors in the Dutch of adult learners with different mother tongues (L1s). The errors observed were subsequently examined in detail to select a number of errors that should receive priority in Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) for Dutch as L2.

The current study investigated first language (L1) effects on listener judgment of comprehensibility and accentedness in second language (L2) speech. The participants were 45 university-level adult speakers of English from three L1 backgrounds (Chinese, Hindi, Farsi), performing a picture narrative task. Ten native English listeners used continuous sliding scales to evaluate the speakers’ audio...

as oral skills are increasingly seen as a high priority, phonology and pronuncia tion teaching are occupying a central position in the teaching and learning of other languages. the present study is an attempt to shed some light on identifying and exploring the diffculties of iranian efl learners in phonology and pronunciation. to achieve this goal, 3 male language learners (elementary, intermed...

This study demonstrates how knowledge of language transfer can enable a computer-assisted pronunciation teaching (CAPT) system to effectively detect and diagnose salient mispronunciations in second language learners’ speech. Our approach uses a HMM-based speech recognizer with an extended pronunciation lexicon that includes both a model pronunciation for each word and common pronunciation varia...