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...

This position paper highlights the importance of suprasegmental training in secondary language (L2) acquisition. Suprasegmental features are manifested in terms of acoustic cues and convey important information about linguistic and information structures. Hence, L2 learners must harness appropriate suprasegmental productions for effective communication. However, this learning process is influen...

An investigation of cascaded and parallel deep neural networks for speech synthesis is conducted. In these systems, suprasegmental linguistic features (syllable-level and above) are processed separately from segmental features (phone-level and below). The suprasegmental component of the networks learns compact distributed representations of high-level linguistic units without any segmental infl...

In various priming paradigms, segmental overlap (i.e. phonological or orthographical overlap) between the target and prime word has been demonstrated to facilitate picture naming. But features extending over several segments are rarely controlled for in stimulus selection. Some attention has been paid to such suprasegmental features, but inconsistent findings have been obtained. The presented s...

A top-down hierarchical system based on deep neural networks is investigated for the modeling of prosody in speech synthesis. Suprasegmental features are processed separately from segmental features and a compact distributed representation of highlevel units is learned at syllable-level. The suprasegmental representation is then integrated into a frame-level network. Objective measures show tha...

Mispronunciation is still among the frailties of language learners the world over. The present study reports an all-out investigation into pronunciation training for the Persian-speaking EFL learners at the intermediate level of language proficiency. More specifically, the present study investigated (a) the underlying causes of mispronunciation at the level of segmental features, (b) the crucia...