2 Individual Pronunciation Coaching The difficulties experienced while learning the pronunciation of a second language do not only depend on the mother tongue of the learners but also on individual differences between learners. Even students of the same mother tongue and with a very similar learning background show huge differences in their individual pronunciation. Learners also differ in term...

In this paper we describe a preliminary, work-in-progress Spoken Language Understanding Software (SLUS) with tailored feedback options, which uses interactive spoken language interface to teach Iraqi Arabic and culture to second language learners. The SLUS analyzes input speech by the second language learner and grades for correct pronunciation in terms of supra-segmental and rudimentary segmen...

We describe techniques used in the development of an automatic annotation system for use with a concatenative text-to-speech synthesis system. The goal of the system is to generate automatically from word-level transcriptions annotations that result in synthetic speech of the same quality as that produced from hand-labelled speech. Our approach in this work has been to use the standard techniqu...

Due to the large variability of pronunciation in spontaneous speech, pronunciation modeling becomes a more challenging and essential part in speech recognition. In this paper, we describe two different approaches of pronunciation modeling by using decision tree. At lexical level, a pronunciation variation dictionary is built to obtain alternative pronunciations for each word, in which each entr...

This research aims to observe pronunciation errors and vowels of Grade IX students MTs Harapan Jasa Makmur. Based on the observation, writer noted that had difficulty differentiating English vowels. The type this was a qualitative method, which is descriptive tends use analysis it in form words instead numbers. In study, main data collection techniques were participant in-depth interviews, docu...

In order to improve the recognition performance, articulation of transcription is very important in process training. For continuous speech, essential characteristics various speakers are pronunciation variation, over focused or inadequately highlighted words can results waveform misalignment sub word unit margin. Because deviation leads into when this compared with dictionary. So deletion inse...

This study investigates how different prosodic features affect native speakers' naturalness judgement of L2 English speech by Chinese students. Through subjective judgment by native speakers and objectively measured prosodic features, timing and pitch related prosodic features, as well as segmental goodness of pronunciation have been found to play key roles in native speakers' perception of nat...

Detecting mispronunciations produced by non-native speakers and providing detailed instructive feedbacks are desired in computer assisted pronunciation training system (CAPT), as it is helpful to L2 learners to improve their pronunciation more effectively. In this paper, we present our preliminary study on detecting phonetic segmental mispronunciations on account of the erroneous articulation t...

In the spoken language translation pipeline, machine translation systems that are trained solely on written bitexts are often unable to recover from speech recognition errors due to the mismatch in training data. We propose a novel technique to simulate the errors generated by an ASR system, using the ASR system’s pronunciation dictionary and language model. Lexical entries in the pronunciation...

This study aims to identify the crucial prosodic factor for native speakers’ naturalness judgement of L2 pronunciation. Prosodic features are known to have more impact on the naturalness of L2 learners’ pronunciation than segmental features do. Among prosodic features, timing and pitch are looked at in this study as major prosodic factors which affect native speakers’ naturalness judgement of L...