The Pronunciation Accuracy of Interactive Dialog System for Malaysian Primary School Students

This project is to examine the accuracy of using existing speech recognition engine in interactive dialog system for English as second language (ESL) Malaysian primary school student in literacy education. Students are interested to learn literacy using computer that encompasses spoken dialog as it motivates students to be more confidence in reading and pronunciation without depending solely on teachers. This computer assisted learning will improve student’s oral reading ability by using the speech recognition in IDS. By using the system students are able to learn, to read and pronounce a word correctly independently without seeking help from teachers. This study is conducted at Sungai Berembang Primary School involving all 16 female and 18 male standard 2 students aged 8 years old. These students possess various reading pronunciation, abilities, and experience in English language with Malay language as their first language. The main objective of this studyis to examine the accuracy of using an existing speech recognition engine for ESL Malaysian students in literacy education. The specific objectives of this study are to identify requirement and evaluate speech recognition based dialog system for reading accuracy. This kind of speech recognition technology is aiming to provide teacher-similar tutoring ability in children’s phonemic awareness, vocabulary building, word comprehension, and fluent reading.This method has five stages. This method enables to construct a framework. Develop system architecture then analyze and design the system. It also builds the prototype for the system upon the system implementation which will be used in this study is the System Development Research Method.Lastly its observe, test the system and the results of the study and implementation of IDS students found 85% of this has helped the English language after using this system

Improving the English literacy skills of Malaysian dyslexic children: the case of culturally responsive mobile multimedia tool

Multimedia tools are becoming convenient and efficient exercise medium for dyslexic children who need to do regular language exercises in order to overcome their neurological learning disability. This study examined a newly developed, culturally responsive mobile multimedia tool for learning English among dyslexic children. The tool is an amalgamation of both cultural and linguistic features in the context of learning English among Malaysian dyslexic children who had different phonological process in utilizing audio capturing tool which hampered the development of their literacy skills. The tool was developed for smartphones and tablets that could run in both Android and IOS platforms. We conducted a test to evaluate the effectiveness of the multimedia tool using quasi experimental method among 20 dyslexic children. The outcomes of the evaluation process revealed that the developed mobile multimedia tool improved both writing and reading capability of the participants compared to traditional training method. This provides evidence that the newly developed culturally responsive multimedia tool could substantially benefit dyslexic Malaysian English learners as well as language instructors who train dyslexic students to acquire literacy skills and attain their better learning capability

Acoustic Model Merging Using Acoustic Models from Multilingual Speakers for Automatic Speech Recognition

International audienceMany studies have explored on the usage of existing multilingual speech corpora to build an acoustic model for a target language. These works on multilingual acoustic modeling often use multilingual acoustic models to create an initial model. This initial model created is often suboptimal in decoding speech of the target language. Some speech of the target language is then used to adapt and improve the initial model. In this paper however, we investigate multilingual acoustic modeling in enhancing an acoustic model of the target language for automatic speech recognition system. The proposed approach employs context dependent acoustic model merging of a source language to adapt acoustic model of a target language. The source and target language speech are spoken by speakers from the same country. Our experiments on Malay and English automatic speech recognition shows relative improvement in WER from 2% to about 10% when multilingual acoustic model was employed

Malay Speech Intelligibility Test (MSIT) for Deaf Malaysian Children

This paper presents a novel approach to objectively measure speech intelligibility of deaf Malaysian children using nonsense syllables as test words. In this study, speech intelligibility of deaf children is measured through the ability to say simple syllables (consisting of a consonant and a vowel) for all the 22 Malay consonants. The MSIT score should indicate how well these children can produce speech; the higher the score, the better their speech intelligibility. The MSIT have been tested with twenty deaf and ten normal hearning Malaysian children and has been verified by five naïve and two expert listeners. The application of the test is presented as speech intelligibility index for deaf children in a deaf school. The successful development of the MSIT system serves to assist speech pathologist, therapist, teachers and parents of deaf children to determine the level of Malay speech deficiencies and the effectiveness of corrective measures taken

Back to Orthoepia – Spelling in Pronunciation Instruction: “Words Commonly Mispronounced” by Learners of Six L1s

This is a continuation of Nowacka’s (2016) study on the importance of local and global errors and spelling in pronunciation instruction. Unlike in the previous research that focused on the performance of Polish learners only, respondents of six different nationalities are included, in search of some cross-national universals or absence of them. This study seeks to answer the following questions: whether there is a need to focus on spelling in a pronunciation course with learners representing six different L1s and if this is the case which graphophonemic / phonotactic rules of English should be explicitly taught to all of these learners and which ones might be L1 specific only. The intention is also to empirically confirm the existence of local errors in the performance of around 240 speakers and 50 more listeners, constituting 291 listeners of six nationalities (Kazakh, Malaysian, Polish, Turkish, Tajik and Ukrainian) and to confirm the usefulness of memorizing Sobkowiak’s (1996) ‘Words Commonly Mispronounced’ even for learners of different L1s

Research methods and intelligibility studies

This paper first briefly reviews the concept of intelligibility as it has been employed in both English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and world Englishes (WE) research. It then examines the findings of the Lingua Franca Core (LFC), a list of phonological features that empirical research has shown to be important for safeguarding mutual intelligibility between non-native speakers of English. The main point of the paper is to analyse these findings and demonstrate that many of them can be explained if three perspectives (linguistic, psycholinguistic and historical-variationist) are taken. This demonstration aims to increase the explanatory power of the concept of intelligibility by providing some theoretical background. An implication for ELF research is that at the phonological level, internationally intelligible speakers have a large number of features in common, regardless of whether they are non-native speakers or native speakers. An implication for WE research is that taking a variety-based, rather than a features-based, view of phonological variation and its connection with intelligibility is likely to be unhelpful, as intelligibility depends to some extent on the phonological features of individual speakers, rather than on the varieties per se

Explicit Demonstration of Cross-linguistic Similarities in Teaching Japanese Kanji to Malaysian University Students

This study examines the usefulness of using Malay to teach Japanese words comprising Chinese characters (“Kanji”) to 107 Malaysian, native Malay-speaking university students. Most participants had no previous knowledge of Japanese and the others were still at the novice level. The experimental group was provided a vocabulary list with written instructions in Malay and Japanese vocabulary that included 28 frequently used characters, whereas the control group was given a list with the same words but without such instructions. The 28 Japanese words were presented as 14 pairs in the list distributed to the experimental group, with each pair comprising a common Kanji component or common Malay radical that highlighted semantic similarities between Japanese and Malay. Both the experimental and control groups were given 30 minutes to learn the 28 Kanji and another 30 minutes to answer identical multiple-choice tests containing 28 questions. After the test, the average scores of the experimental and control groups were analyzed using the t-test. At a 5% confidence level, a significant difference was found between the scores of the two groups (p < .001, t = 6.893, d = 1.34). Thus, the authors concluded that providing a vocabulary list highlighting semantic similarities between Japanese and Malay with written instruction in Malay, the learners’ first language, can benefit native Malay-speaking university students in their acquisition of basic Chinese characters used in Japanese

Pronunciation variations and context-dependent model to improve ASR performance for dyslexic children’s read speech

Focusing on the key element for an ASR-based application for dyslexic children reading isolated words in Bahasa Melayu, this paper can be an evidence of the need to have a carefully designed acoustic model for a satisfying recognition accuracy of 79.17% on test dataset. Pronunciation variations and context-dependent model are two main components of such acoustic model. This model adopts the most frequent errors in reading selected vocabulary, which are obtained from primary data collection and analysis.The analysis gives the most frequent spelling and reading errors as vowel substitution with over 20% of total errors made

Tajweed Rules Haptic Application with Sound for Visually Impaired People

Every Muslim in this world needs to read Quran as one of religion activities in Islam. Quran can be read in a book and even in digitalized form of Quran such as in mobile phones and also electronic type of Quran. However, blind people are unable to read Quran in book form and digitalized form. Therefore, this project aims to address the problems faced by blind people and partially impaired people to learn on how to recite Quran with right Tajweed which synchronizes audio and haptic. Interview session with blind people and partially impaired people will be done to determine what are the limitations and problems faced by them during reciting Quran. Respondents from Malaysian Association for the Blind (MAB) will be the main focus group for this project. Hence, this research study will discover ways to help blind people and partially impaired people to read Quran with right Tajweed and right pronunciation. This project is hoped to successfully help blind people and partially impaired people to teach and learn on how to recite Quran properly with the help of Braille Line 20 haptic and audio application

English-to-Malay Speaking Dictionary (E2MSpeaktionary)

This report is to provide necessary information pertaining to the Final Year Project carried out. In Chapter 1, we discussed about background, problem statement as well as objective and scope of study/work. This tells basically what the project is all about, the target user, and the areas I attended to throughout the project. Chapter 2 is brief information about all information, literatures, theories, books, research results, and journals that I reviewed earlier. In Chapter 3, the methodology used is prototype method and all relevant project works are listed within the chapter. For Chapter 4, I disclosed my discussions and finding from my research in order to execute the project from time to time while in Chapter 5 is my conclusion and recommendation on the project and relevant matters