This study examined the impact of Clear Pronunciation 2 software on teaching English suprasegmental features, focusing on stress, rhythm and intonation. In particular, the software covers five topics in relation to suprasegmental features including consonant cluster, word stress, connected speech, sentence stress and intonation. Seven Iranian EFL learners participated in this study. The study l...

In this paper, a data-oriented model of text-to-speech processing is described. On the basis of a large text-to-speech corpus, the model automatically gathers a distributed , yet symbolic representation of subword-phoneme association knowledge, representing this knowledge in the form of paths in a decision tree. Paths represent context-sensitive rewrite rules which unambiguously map strings of ...

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 ...

This study aims at automatically estimating probability of individual words of Japanese English (JE) being perceived correctly by American listeners and clarifying what kinds of (combinations of) segmental, prosodic, and linguistic errors in the words are more fatal to their correct perception. From a JE speech database, a balanced set of 360 utterances by 90 male speakers are firstly selected....

• Neural acoustic models can be used to automatically model pronunciation variation. Pronunciation variation is best captured by intermediate layers of transformer models. Transformer-based embeddings capture details not expressed phonetic transcriptions. Variation in speech often quantified comparing transcriptions the same utterance. However, manually transcribing time-consuming and error pro...

This study is about the use of computer assisted approach in teaching English pronunciation Urban Secondary Schools Kigali, Rwanda, using mixed research method through a self-administered questionnaire and an interview guide. Quantitative data was analyzed descriptive statistics while qualitative thematic approach. Teachers considered useful due to its ability provide proper pronunciation, enab...

The context in which a phoneme occurs leads to consistent differences in how it is pronounced. Phonologists employ a variety of contextual descriptors, based on factors such as stress and syllable boundaries, to explain phonological variation. However, in developing pronunciation networks for speech recognition systems, little explicit use is made of context other than the use of whole word mod...

Many beginning-level Chinese learners, particularly those whose mother tongue is not a tone language find it challenging to learn Chinese pronunciations and tones. Yet pronunciation practice in formal language class settings is limited. Therefore, it has become necessary to develop computer-assisted and adaptive training systems to help learners practice Chinese pronunciation outside of class. ...

There is broad agreement as to many of the segmental features of the Hong Kong accent of English: neutralisation of vowels which contrast in Standard Southern British English or General American, non-release of final stops, simplification of consonant clusters and devoicing of coda consonants. However, while it is apparent that there is no reason why these features should not co-occur within si...

This paper introduces our work and results related to a multiple language continuous speech recognition task. The aim was to design a system that introduces tolerable amount of recognition errors for point of interest words in voice navigational queries even in the presence of real-life traffic noise. Additional challenges were that no task-specific training databases were available for languag...