The aim of the current study was to investigate whether L2 minimal pairs practice would have an effect on Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ pronunciation accuracy. For this purpose, 30 Iranian intermediate EFL learners at Simin institute participated in the experiment of the study. The selection of subjects was done from among 150 EFL learners at intermediate level. In order to make subj...

We propose a novel method for lexicon expansion using pronunciation variations extracted on the basis of speaker-related deviations in ASR error statistics. Two types of pronunciation variations were extracted: common pronunciation variations found with most speakers, and speaker-related pronunciation variations, identified on the basis of recognition error elements weighted by idf and tf-idf m...

â â â  avicenna and the arabic phonetics â â â â â  * mahmood shakib ansari â  * * alireza yusofi â â â  abstract â  avicenna, the iranian philosopher and sage, mostly famous for his scientific works such as law and the shifa has done some studies in arabic phonetics as well. besides pointing to some physical aspects of sounds in the above mentioned books, he has also written a monograph in ara...

In this work, we define a measure aimed at assessing how well a pronunciation model will function when used as a component of a speech recognition system. This measure, pronunciation entropy, fuses information from both the pronunciation model and the language model. We show how to compute this score by effectively composing the output of a phoneme recognizer with a pronunciation dictionary and...

Modeling pronunciation variants is an important topic for automatic speech recognition. This paper investigates the pronunciation modeling at the lexical level, and presents a detailed modeling of the probabilities of the pronunciation variants. The approach is evaluated on the French ESTER2 corpus, and a significant word error rate reduction is achieved through the use of context and speaking ...

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 generating a sophisticated alternative pronunciation dictionary, two ...

A significant source of variation in spontaneous speech is due to intra-speaker pronunciation changes. Previous work in automatic speech recognition has identified several factors that affect pronunciation variability such as phonetic context and speaking rate. This work examines new higher level information sources: syntax and discourse structure, specifically the relationship between these fa...

The current emphasis in second language teaching lies in the achievement of communicative effectiveness. In line with this approach, pronunciation training is nowadays geared towards helping learners avoid serious pronunciation errors, rather than eradicating the finest traces of foreign accent. However, to devise optimal pronunciation training programmes, systematic information on these pronun...