In the frame of the Inco-Copernicus program of the European Commission titled „A Multimedia Multilingual Teaching and Training System for Speech Handicapped children” an audiovisual pronunciation teaching and training method and software system has been developed for hearing and speechhandicapped persons to help them to control their speech production. During a part of the training the interpre...

The current paper discusses first investigations aimed to lay the groundwork for the development of computer-aided pronunciation training for teaching Mandarin to Germans. We conducted a contrastive analysis of the two languages leading to a set of tokens for a production and perception experiment involving German first-year students of Mandarin. Their data were perceptually evaluated by a teac...

Feedback on pronunciation is vital for spoken language teaching. Automatic pronunciation evaluation and feedback can help non-native speakers to identify their errors, learn sounds and vocabulary, and improve their pronunciation performance. Such speech recognition can be performed using Sphinx trained on a database of native exemplar pronunciation and non-native examples of frequent mistakes. ...

This paper studies pronunciation scoring algorithm in CALL system aiming at teaching native Chinese learn standard Mandarin. Most of the pronunciation scoring algorithms focus on non-native environment, which may not be suitable for native speakers. We bring up a new algorithm based on traditional posterior log-likelihood algorithm by weighting the initial part of Mandarin syllables, where fina...

The present contribution provides an overview of some innovative approaches to pronunciation pedagogy, focusing on cross-modal reinforcements aimed at facilitating the process of L2 phonological perception and production. The paper starts with a brief introduction to recent theories of multisensory integration and proceeds with practical suggestions for multimodal reinforcements integrating vis...

This paper reports on the early stages of a locally funded research and development project taking place in a French university. It aims at developing a comprehensive pedagogical framework for pronunciation training for adult learners of English. This framework will combine a direct approach to pronunciation training (Face-to-Face teaching) with online instruction using and adapting existing AS...

This work presents methods of assessing non-native speech to aid computer-assisted pronunciation teaching. These methods are based on automatic speech recognition (ASR) techniques using Hidden Markov Models. Conn-dence scores at the phoneme level are calculated to provide detailed information about the pronunciation quality of a foreign language student. Experimental results are given based on ...

This paper presents error patterns built on the basis of our comparative analysis of American English and Mexican Spanish phonemes and allophones which can be applied in designing the error detection module of a Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) System for teaching American English pronunciation to Mexican Spanish speakers. Error identification is important for an adequate choice ...

A system was developed for teaching non-Japanese learners pronunciation of Japanese lexical accents. The system first identifies word accent types in a learner's utterance using F0 change between two adjacent morae as the feature parameter. As for the representative F0 value for a mora, we defined one with a good match to the perceived pitch. The system notices the user if his/her pronunciation...

High Variability Pronunciation Training (HVPT) is a highly successful alternative to ASR-based pronunciation training. It has been demonstrated that HVPT is effective in teaching the perception of non-native phonemic contrasts, and that this skill generalizes to the perception of unfamiliar words and talkers, transfers to pronunciation, and is retained long-term. HVPT is, however, not efficient...