There are obvious issues with regard to teaching pronunciation to Gujarati Speakers of English (GSE). These issues have its root in the inherent difference between the phonology of Gujarati and English at both segmental and supra-segmental level. There is sufficient research evidence to prove that these phonological differences are largely responsible for problems in teaching English pronunciat...

Lexically guided perceptual learning refers to the use of lexical knowledge to retune speech categories and thereby adapt to a novel talker’s pronunciation. This adaptation has been extensively documented, but primarily for segmental-based learning in English and Dutch. In languages with lexical tone, such as Mandarin Chinese, tonal categories can also be retuned in this way, but segmental cate...

We compared pitch patterns of Japanese intonational phrases spoken by a native speaker of Chinese. Several types of pitch errors were distinguished according to pitch contour shapes within and across intonational phrases. These shapes differ categorically from one another—for instance, the learner uses flat contours while the native uses hump-like contours. Comparisons of the learner and native...

Daniel J. Olson, Purdue University While a growing body of research has established the benefits of pronunciation training on second language (L2) production, these benefits have yet to be incorporated into the general skills language classroom in a systematic manner. Furthermore, although relatively new speech analysis software has been shown to be useful in providing visual feedback for L2 su...

This paper describes reducing phone label errors in TTS voice building by means of modeling of speaker pronunciation variants. Each speaker has his or her own unique pronunciations (and context-dependent variations), so that no one standard lexicon is able to cover all of the speaker’s variations. Creating speaker-dependent pronunciation lexicons for automatic speech labeling of our TTS voice d...

There are 10 major dialects in China. Most people in dialectal regions are bilingual speakers, i.e. native dialect and Mandarin. Although lots of people can speak Mandarin, they speak it with different accents (called regional accented Chinese in this paper) depending on how well they grasp the language. In this study, we categorize the regional accented Chinese into 3 levels of accents accordi...

A significant source of errors in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems is due to pronunciation variations which occur in spontaneous and conversational speech. Usually ASR systems use a finite lexicon that provides one or more pronunciations for each word. In this paper, we focus on learning a similarity function between two pronunciations. The pronunciation can be the canonical and the s...

This paper describes an approach to synthesizing personalized speech while maintaining not only speaker voice but also speaker pronunciation peculiarities. Personalization is realized by means of pronunciation models trained on speaker data contained in his/her speech database. Untrained models allow to synthesize speech in neutral normative style. On the segmental level, the transcription mode...

Pronunciation variation in conversational speech has caused significant amount of word errors in large vocabulary automatic speech recognition. Rule-based approaches and decision-tree based approaches have been previously proposed to model pronunciation variation. In this paper, we report our work on modeling pronunciation variation using artificial neural networks (ANN). The results we achieve...

This article is based on a professional development session or presentation that the author gave in regional TESOL affiliate conference, and it discusses importance of teaching, why ESL/ EFL teachers should teach pronunciation, reasons they generally give for avoiding how we can integrate into our curriculum. The sheds light SLA, Second Language Acquisition, research especially studies are rela...