This paper presents an approach to automatically extract and evaluate the “stability” of pronunciation variants (i.e., adequacy of the model to accommodate this variability), based on multiple pronunciations of each lexicon words and the knowledge of a reference baseform pronunciation. Most approaches toward modelling pronunciation variability in speech recognition are based on the inference (t...

Over the last few years, the realm of foreign language learning has witnessed an abundance of research concerning the effectiveness of corrective feedback on the acquisition of grammatical features, with the study of other target language subsystems, such as pronunciation, being few and far between. In order to bridge this gap, the present study intended to investigate and compare the immediate...

This paper aims to present an analysis of English pronunciation variations using the TIMIT corpus of American English. The manually annotated data are analyzed by comparing the pronunciation variants to their canonical pronunciations which are defined by using the CMU Pronunciation Dictionary. Vowels and consonants are separately analyzed with respect to substitution, deletion and insertion. Th...

Computer-assisted language learning (CALL) is reaching an up most position in the pedagogical field of English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESL/EFL). The present study was carried out to study the effect of using phonetic websites on Iranian EFL students’ pronunciation and knowledge of phonemic symbols. Participants of the study included 30 EFL female pre-intermediate students studyin...

In this paper a method for generating word pronunciation networks for speech recognition is proposed. The networks incorporate different acceptable pronunciation variants for each word. These variants are determined by applying pronunciation rules to the standard pronunciation of the words. Instead of a manual search, an automatic learning procedure is used to compose a sensible set of rules. T...

This research is aimed at analyzing and improving automatic pronunciation error detection in a second language. Dutch vowels spoken by adult non-native learners of Dutch are used as a test case. A first study on Dutch pronunciation by L2 learners with different L1s revealed that vowel pronunciation errors are relatively frequent and often concern subtle acoustic differences between the realizat...

We automatically generate CG animations to express the pronunciation movement of speech through articulatory feature (AF) extraction to help learn a pronunciation. The proposed system uses MRI data to map AFs to coordinate values that are needed to generate the animations. By using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data, we can observe the movements of the tongue, palate, and pharynx in detail w...