11,971 research outputs found
Native Speaker Perceptions of Accented Speech: The English Pronunciation of Macedonian EFL Learners
The paper reports on the results of a study that aimed to describe the vocalic and consonantal features of the English pronunciation of Macedonian EFL learners as perceived by native speakers of English and to find out whether native speakers who speak different standard variants of English perceive the same segments as non-native. A specially designed computer web application was employed to gather two types of data: a) quantitative (frequency of segment variables and global foreign accent ratings on a 5-point scale), and b) qualitative (open-ended questions). The result analysis points out to three most frequent markers of foreign accent in the English speech of Macedonian EFL learners: final obstruent devoicing, vowel shortening and substitution of English dental fricatives with Macedonian dental plosives. It also reflects additional phonetic aspects poorly explained in the available reference literature such as allophonic distributional differences between the two languages and intonational mismatch
Language Transfer of Audio Word2Vec: Learning Audio Segment Representations without Target Language Data
Audio Word2Vec offers vector representations of fixed dimensionality for
variable-length audio segments using Sequence-to-sequence Autoencoder (SA).
These vector representations are shown to describe the sequential phonetic
structures of the audio segments to a good degree, with real world applications
such as query-by-example Spoken Term Detection (STD). This paper examines the
capability of language transfer of Audio Word2Vec. We train SA from one
language (source language) and use it to extract the vector representation of
the audio segments of another language (target language). We found that SA can
still catch phonetic structure from the audio segments of the target language
if the source and target languages are similar. In query-by-example STD, we
obtain the vector representations from the SA learned from a large amount of
source language data, and found them surpass the representations from naive
encoder and SA directly learned from a small amount of target language data.
The result shows that it is possible to learn Audio Word2Vec model from
high-resource languages and use it on low-resource languages. This further
expands the usability of Audio Word2Vec.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1603.0098
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